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A secure, usable, and transparent middleware for permission managers on Android
IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing
  • Daibin WANG, Huazhong University of Science and Technology
  • Haixia YAO, Singapore Management University
  • Yingjiu LI, Singapore Management University
  • Hai JIN, Huazhong University of Science and Technology
  • Deqing ZOU, Huazhong University of Science and Technology
  • Robert H. DENG, Singapore Management University
Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
acceptedVersion
Publication Date
7-2017
Abstract

Android’s permission system offers an all-or-nothing choice when installing an app. To make it more flexible and fine-grained, users may choose a popular app tool, called permission manager, to selectively grant or revoke an app’s permissions at runtime. A fundamental requirement for such permission manager is that the granted or revoked permissions should be enforced faithfully. However, we discover that none of existing permission managers meet this requirement due to permission leaks, in which an unprivileged app can exercise certain permissions which are revoked or not-granted through communicating with a privileged app. To address this problem, we propose a secure, usable, and transparent OS-level middleware for any permission manager to defend against the permission leaks. The middleware is provably secure in a sense that it can effectively block all possible permission leaks. The middleware is designed to have a minimal impact on the usability of running apps. In addition, the middleware is transparent to users and app developers and it requires minor modifications on permission managers and Android OS. Finally, our evaluation shows that the middleware incurs relatively low performance overhead and power consumption.

Keywords
  • Androids,
  • Humanoid robots,
  • Middleware,
  • Smart phones,
  • Runtime,
  • Read only memory,
  • Power line communications
Identifier
10.1109/TDSC.2015.2479613
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Creative Commons License
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International
Comments

Available online 17 September 2015

Additional URL
http://doi.org/10.1109/TDSC.2015.2479613
Citation Information
Daibin WANG, Haixia YAO, Yingjiu LI, Hai JIN, et al.. "A secure, usable, and transparent middleware for permission managers on Android" IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing Vol. 14 Iss. 4 (2017) p. 350 - 362 ISSN: 1545-5971
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/robert-deng/131/