Android Run-time Permission Exploitation User Awareness by Means of Formal Methods

Fausto Fasano, Fabio Martinelli, Francesco Mercaldo, Francesco Mercaldo, Antonella Santone

2020

Abstract

Our mobile devices store a lot of sensitive and critical information. Moreover, considering the ability of smartphones and tables to detect the position and to record audio, it is not absolutely an exaggeration to admit that potentially our devices can easily spy on us. The ability to perform these crucial tasks must be granted by the user at the time of their first use by accepting the so-called permissions. The problem is that in Android, once these permissions are granted, the application can always use them without notifying the user. In this paper, we propose a methodology, based on formal methods, aimed to detect the exact point in the code (in term of package, class and method) of an Android application where a permission is invoked at run-time. Moreover we design a tool able to advise the user whether a permission is invoked, in this way the user can be informed about the application behaviour.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Fasano F., Martinelli F., Mercaldo F. and Santone A. (2020). Android Run-time Permission Exploitation User Awareness by Means of Formal Methods. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ForSE, ISBN 978-989-758-399-5, pages 804-814. DOI: 10.5220/0009372308040814

in Bibtex Style

@conference{forse20,
author={Fausto Fasano and Fabio Martinelli and Francesco Mercaldo and Antonella Santone},
title={Android Run-time Permission Exploitation User Awareness by Means of Formal Methods},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ForSE,},
year={2020},
pages={804-814},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0009372308040814},
isbn={978-989-758-399-5},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ForSE,
TI - Android Run-time Permission Exploitation User Awareness by Means of Formal Methods
SN - 978-989-758-399-5
AU - Fasano F.
AU - Martinelli F.
AU - Mercaldo F.
AU - Santone A.
PY - 2020
SP - 804
EP - 814
DO - 10.5220/0009372308040814