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Towards Android Application Protection via Kernel Extension

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Algorithms and Architectures for Parallel Processing (ICA3PP 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 11338))

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Abstract

As an integral part of Android system security, Android application protection has always been favored by researchers. The current popular protection schemes include the source code confusion, anti-debugging technology, and confusions of executable files. However, these schemes modify the applications more or less undoubtedly, and that causes inconvenience while these applications are running. This article proposes a kernel-level Android application protection scheme which can eliminate the need for additional application modifications and protect all application data. Therefore, we designed an encryption system and implemented a prototype system Godzilla on the basis of the Linux kernel 3.18.14 in order to verify the validity of the design. Experiments show that the system can achieve our goals well. Compared to non-protected applications, protected ones will have corresponding time loss during installation and startup, but they are all within acceptable limits.

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Acknowledgement

This work was supported by Guangzhou scholars project for universities of Guangzhou (No. 1201561613).

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Wang, T., Liu, L., Gao, C., Hu, J., Liu, J. (2018). Towards Android Application Protection via Kernel Extension. In: Hu, T., Wang, F., Li, H., Wang, Q. (eds) Algorithms and Architectures for Parallel Processing. ICA3PP 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11338. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05234-8_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05234-8_16

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-05233-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-05234-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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