Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

LinkFlow: Efficient Large-Scale Inter-app Privacy Leakage Detection

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Security and Privacy in Communication Networks (SecureComm 2017)

Abstract

Android enables inter-app collaboration and function reusability by providing flexible Inter-Component Communication (ICC) across apps. Meanwhile, ICC introduces serious privacy leakage problems due to component hijacking, component injection, and application collusion attacks. Taint analysis technique has been adopted to successfully detect potential leakage between two mobile apps. However, it is still a challenge to efficiently perform large-scale leakage detection among a large set of apps, which may communicate through various ICC channels. In this paper, we develop a privacy leakage detection mechanism called LinkFlow to detect privacy leakage through ICC on a large set of apps. LinkFlow first leverages taint analysis technique to enumerate ICC links that may lead to privacy leakage in each individual app. Since most ICC links are normal, this step can dramatically reduce the number of risky ICC links for the next step analysis, where those ICC links are matched among leaky apps. We develop an algorithm to identify privacy leakage by analyzing ICC links and the associated permissions. We implement a LinkFlow prototype and evaluate its effectiveness with more than 4500 apps including 3014 benign apps from five apps marketplaces and 1500 malicious apps from two malware repositories. LinkFlow can successfully capture 6065 privacy leak paths among 530 apps. We also observe that more than 400 benign apps have vulnerabilities of privacy leakage in inter-app communications.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 109.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 143.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Android Guard: http://android.app.qq.com/myapp/detail.htm?apkName=org.androidbeans.guard

  2. APKPure. https://apkpure.com/

  3. Ditty by Zya. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zya.ditty

  4. F-Droid. https://f-droid.org/

  5. Google Play. https://play.google.com

  6. Hiapk. www.hiapk.com/

  7. Intents and intent filters. http://developer.android.com/guide/components/intents-filters.html

  8. MongoDB. https://www.mongodb.org/

  9. A part of ICC APIs, the defination of Intent. https://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/Intent.html

  10. SMS Popup. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.everythingandroid.smspopup

  11. SMSZombie. http://blog.trustgo.com/SMSZombie/

  12. Tencent Markletplace. http://sj.qq.com/myapp/

  13. VirusShare. https://virusshare.com/

  14. Vulnerability of Dropbox SDK. http://www.slideshare.net/ibmsecurity/remote-exploitation-of-the-dropbox-sdk-for-android

  15. Afonso, V., Bianchi, A., Fratantonio, Y., Doupé, A., Polino, M., de Geus, P., Kruegel, C., Vigna, G.: Going native: using a large-scale analysis of android apps to create a practical native-code sandboxing policy. In: NDSS (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Arzt, S., Rasthofer, S., Fritz, C., Bodden, E., Bartel, A., Klein, J., Le Traon, Y., Octeau, D., McDaniel, P.: Flowdroid: precise context, flow, field, object-sensitive and lifecycle-aware taint analysis for android apps. In: PLDI, vol. 49, no. 6, pp. 259–269 (2014)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Au, K.W.Y., Zhou, Y.F., Huang, Z., Lie, D.: PScout: analyzing the android permission specification. In: CCS, pp. 217–228 (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Bartel, A., Klein, J., Le Traon, Y., Monperrus, M.: Dexpler: converting android dalvik bytecode to jimple for static analysis with soot. In: SOAP, pp. 27–38 (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Bartel, A., Klein, J., Monperrus, M., Le Traon, Y.: Static analysis for extracting permission checks of a large scale framework: the challenges and solutions for analyzing Android. TSE 40(6), 617–632 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Bugiel, S., Davi, L., Dmitrienko, A., Fischer, T., Sadeghi, A.-R.: Xmandroid: a new android evolution to mitigate privilege escalation attacks. Technische Universität Darmstadt, Technical Report TR-2011-04 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Bugiel, S., Davi, L., Dmitrienko, A., Fischer, T., Sadeghi, A.-R., Shastry, B.: Towards taming privilege-escalation attacks on android. In: NDSS (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Bugiel, S., Heuser, S., Sadeghi, A.-R.: Flexible and fine-grained mandatory access control on android for diverse security and privacy policies. In: USENIX Security, pp. 131–146 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Chin, E., Felt, A.P., Greenwood, K., Wagner, D.: Analyzing inter-application communication in Android. In: MobiSys, pp. 239–252 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Davi, L., Dmitrienko, A., Sadeghi, A.-R., Winandy, M.: Privilege escalation attacks on android. In: Burmester, M., Tsudik, G., Magliveras, S., Ilić, I. (eds.) ISC 2010. LNCS, vol. 6531, pp. 346–360. Springer, Heidelberg (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-18178-8_30

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  25. Elish, K.O., Yao, D., Ryder, B.G.: On the need of precise inter-app ICC classification for detecting android malware collusions. In: MoST (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Enck, W., Gilbert, P., Han, S., Tendulkar, V., Chun, B.-G., Cox, L.P., Jung, J., McDaniel, P., Sheth, A.N.: TaintDroid: an information-flow tracking system for realtime privacy monitoring on smartphones. In: OSDI (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  27. Felt, A.P., Wang, H.J., Moshchuk, A., Hanna, S., Chin, E.: Permission re-delegation: attacks and defenses. In: USENIX Security, vol. 30 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  28. Fuchs, A.P., Chaudhuri, A., Foster, J.S.: Scandroid: automated security certification of android. Technical report, University of Maryland (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  29. Gordon, M.I., Kim, D., Perkins, J.H., Gilham, L., Nguyen, N., Rinard, M.C.: Information flow analysis of android applications in DroidSafe. In: NDSS (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  30. Grace, M.C., Zhou, W., Jiang, X., Sadeghi, A.-R.: Unsafe exposure analysis of mobile in-app advertisements. In: WISEC, pp. 101–112 (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  31. Grace, M.C., Zhou, Y., Wang, Z., Jiang, X.: Systematic detection of capability leaks in stock android smartphones. In: NDSS (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  32. Holavanalli, S., Manuel, D., Nanjundaswamy, V., Rosenberg, B., Shen, F., Ko, S.Y., Ziarek, L.: Flow permissions for android. In: ASE, pp. 652–657 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  33. Kim, J., Yoon, Y., Yi, K., Shin, J., Center, S.: Scandal: static analyzer for detecting privacy leaks in android applications. In: MoST 12 (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  34. Klieber, W., Flynn, L., Bhosale, A., Jia, L., Bauer, L.: Android taint flow analysis for app sets. In: SOAP, pp. 1–6 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  35. Lam, P., Bodden, E., Lhoták, O., Hendren, L.: The soot framework for Java program analysis: a retrospective. In: CETUS 2011 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  36. Lhoták, O., Hendren, L.: Scaling Java points-to analysis using Spark. In: Hedin, G. (ed.) CC 2003. LNCS, vol. 2622, pp. 153–169. Springer, Heidelberg (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36579-6_12

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  37. Li, L., Bartel, A., Bissyandé, T.F., Klein, J., Traon, Y.L.: ApkCombiner: combining multiple android apps to support inter-app analysis. In: Federrath, H., Gollmann, D. (eds.) SEC 2015. IAICT, vol. 455, pp. 513–527. Springer, Cham (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18467-8_34

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  38. Li, L., Bartel, A., Bissyandé, T.F., Klein, J., Le Traon, Y., Arzt, S., Rasthofer, S., Bodden, E., Octeau, D., McDaniel, P.: IccTA: detecting inter-component privacy leaks in android apps. In: ICSE, pp. 280–291 (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  39. Li, L., Bartel, A., Klein, J., Le Traon, Y.: Detecting privacy leaks in android apps. In: ESSoS-DS (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  40. Li, L., Bartel, A., Klein, J., Le Traon, Y.: Automatically exploiting potential component leaks in android applications. In: TrustCom, pp. 388–397 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  41. Lu, L., Li, Z., Wu, Z., Lee, W., Jiang, G.: CHEX: statically vetting android apps for component hijacking vulnerabilities. In: CCS, pp. 229–240 (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  42. Marforio, C., Ritzdorf, H., Francillon, A., Capkun, S.: Analysis of the communication between colluding applications on modern smartphones. In: ACSAC, pp. 51–60 (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  43. Rasthofer, S., Arzt, S., Bodden, E.: A machine-learning approach for classifying and categorizing android sources and sinks. In: NDSS (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  44. Reina, A., Fattori, A., Cavallaro, L.: A system call-centric analysis and stimulation technique to automatically reconstruct android malware behaviors. In: EuroSec, April 2013

    Google Scholar 

  45. Reps, T., Horwitz, S., Sagiv, M.: Precise interprocedural dataflow analysis via graph reachability. In: POPL, pp. 49–61. ACM (1995)

    Google Scholar 

  46. Sakamoto, S., Okuda, K., Nakatsuka, R., Yamauchi, T.: DroidTrack: tracking and visualizing information diffusion for preventing information leakage on android. JISIS 4(2), 55–69 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  47. Schlegel, R., Zhang, K., Zhou, X.-Y., Intwala, M., Kapadia, A., Wang, X.: Soundcomber: a stealthy and context-aware sound trojan for smartphones. In: NDSS, vol. 11, pp. 17–33 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  48. Seo, J., Kim, D., Cho, D., Kim, T., Shin, I.: FLEXDROID: enforcing in-app privilege separation in android. In: NDSS (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  49. Shen, F., Vishnubhotla, N., Todarka, C., Arora, M., Dhandapani, B., Lehner, E.J., Ko, S.Y., Ziarek, L.: Information flows as a permission mechanism. In: ASE, pp. 515–526 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  50. Tam, K., Khan, S.J., Fattori, A., Cavallaro, L.: CopperDroid: automatic reconstruction of android malware behaviors. In: NDSS (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  51. Tripp, O., Rubin, J.: A bayesian approach to privacy enforcement in smartphones. In: USENIX Security, pp. 175–190 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  52. Wei, F., Roy, S., Ou, X., et al.: Amandroid: a precise and general inter-component data flow analysis framework for security vetting of android apps. In: CCS, pp. 1329–1341. ACM (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  53. Yang, K., Zhuge, J., Wang, Y., Zhou, L., Duan, H.: IntentFuzzer: detecting capability leaks of android applications. In: ASIACCS, pp. 531–536 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  54. Yang, Z., Yang, M.: Leakminer: detect information leakage on android with static taint analysis. In: WCSE, pp. 101–104 (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  55. Zhang, M., Yin, H.: AppSealer: automatic generation of vulnerability-specific patches for preventing component hijacking attacks in android applications. In: NDSS (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  56. Zhou, Y., Jiang, X.: Dissecting android malware: Characterization and evolution. In: IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, pp. 95–109 (2012)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

The research is partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61572278, the National Key Research and Development Program of China under Grant 2016YFB0800102, and U.S. Office of Naval Research under Grant N00014-16-1-3214 and N00014-16-1-3216.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Graduate School of Shenzhen, Tsinghua University, Shenzhen, China

    Yi He & Qi Li

  2. Department of Information Sciences and Technology, George Mason University, Fairfax, USA

    Kun Sun

Authors
  1. Yi He
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Qi Li
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Kun Sun
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Qi Li .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

    Xiaodong Lin

  2. University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada

    Ali Ghorbani

  3. University at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York, USA

    Kui Ren

  4. Pennsylvania State University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

    Sencun Zhu

  5. Anhui Normal University, Wuhu, China

    Aiqing Zhang

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2018 ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

He, Y., Li, Q., Sun, K. (2018). LinkFlow: Efficient Large-Scale Inter-app Privacy Leakage Detection. In: Lin, X., Ghorbani, A., Ren, K., Zhu, S., Zhang, A. (eds) Security and Privacy in Communication Networks. SecureComm 2017. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 238. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78813-5_15

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78813-5_15

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-78812-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-78813-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation