Skip to main content

Introducing Probabilities in Contract-Based Approaches for Mobile Application Security

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Data Privacy Management and Autonomous Spontaneous Security (DPM 2013, SETOP 2013)

Abstract

Security for mobile devices is a problem of capital importance, especially due to new threats coming from malicious applications. This has been proved by the increasing interest of the research community on the topic of security on mobile devices. Several security solutions have been recently proposed, to address the uprising threats coming from malicious applications. However, several mechanisms may result not flexible enough, hard to apply, or too coarse grained, e.g. several critics have been raised against the Android permission system.

We argue that, it is possible to obtain more flexible security tools and finer grained security requirements by introducing probability measurements.

In this paper we discuss how to introduce probabilistic clauses into the Security-by-Contract and the Security-by-Contract-with-Trust frameworks, revising the main building blocks and providing tools to write probabilistic contracts and policies. A proof-of-concept implementation on Android system has also been presented.

The research leading to these results has received funding from the EU Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant n. 256980 (NESSoS), n. 257930 (Aniketos), from PRIN Security Horizons funded by MIUR with D.D. 23.10.2012 n. 719, and EIT ICT Labs activity 13077.

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

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
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. Dragoni, N., Martinelli, F., Massacci, F., Mori, P., Schaefer, C., Walter, T., Vetillard, E.: Security-by-contract (\({\text{ S } \times \text{ C }}\)) for software and services of mobile systems. In: At Your Service - Service-Oriented Computing from an EU Perspective. MIT Press, Cambridge (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Costa, G., Dragoni, N., Lazouski, A., Martinelli, F., Massacci, F., Matteucci, I.: Extending Security-by-Contract with quantitative trust on mobile devices. In: Proceeding of the Fourth International Conference on Complex, Intelligent and Software Intensive Systems, pp. 872–877. IEEE Computer Society (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Costa, G., Dragoni, N., Issarny, V., Lazouski, A., Martinelli, F., Massacci, F., Matteucci, I., Saadi, R.: Security-by-Contract-with-Trust for mobile devices. JOWUA 1(4), 75–91 (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Greci, P., Martinelli, F., Matteucci, I.: A framework for contract-policy matching based on symbolic simulations for securing mobile device application. In: Margaria, T., Steffen, B. (eds.) ISoLA 2008. CCIS, vol. 17, pp. 221–236. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Necula, G.C.: Proof-carrying code. In: Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL ’97), pp. 106–119 (1997)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Sekar, R., Venkatakrishnan, V., Basu, S., Bhatkar, S., DuVarney, D.C.: Model-carrying code: a practical approach for safe execution of untrusted applications. In: Proceedings of the Nineteenth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, pp. 15–28 (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Hermanns, H., Parma, A., Segala, R., Wachter, B., Zhang, L.: Probabilistic logical characterization. Inf. Comput. 209(2), 154–172 (2011)

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  8. Baier, C., Engelen, B., Majster-Cederbaum, M.: Deciding bisimilarity and similarity for probabilistic processes. J. Comput. Syst. Sci. 60(1), 187–231 (2000)

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  9. Sharkey, M.I.: Probabilistic proof-carrying code. Ph.D. thesis, Carleton University (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Tsukada, Y.: Interactive and probabilistic proof of mobile code safety. Autom. Software Eng. 12(2), 237–257 (2005)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Desharnais, J., Laviolette, F., Tracol, M.: Approximate analysis of probabilistic processes: logic, simulation and games. In: Proceedings of the 2008 Fifth International Conference on Quantitative Evaluation of Systems, QEST ’08, pp. 264–273. IEEE Computer Society, Washington DC (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Aldini, A., Martinelli, F., Saracino, A., Sgandurra, D.: A collaborative framework for generating probabilistic contracts. In: Smari, W.W., Fox, G.C. (eds.) Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems, SECOTS 2013, pp. 139–143. IEEE Computer Society, San Diego (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Juniper Networks Global Threat Center: Malicious Mobile Threats Report 2010/2011 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Zhou, Y., Zhang, X., Jiang, X., Freeh, V.W.: Taming information-stealing smartphone applications (on android). In: McCune, J.M., Balacheff, B., Perrig, A., Sadeghi, A.-R., Sasse, A., Beres, Y. (eds.) TRUST 2011. LNCS, vol. 6740, pp. 93–107. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Felt, A.P., Ha, E., Egelman, S., Haney, A., Chin, E., Wagner, D.: Android permissions: user attention, comprehension, and behavior. Technical report, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California at Berkeley (2012) http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2012/EECS-2012-26.html

  16. Dragoni, N., Massacci, F.: Security-by-contract for web services. In: SWS, pp. 90–98 (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Gadyatskaya, O., Massacci, F., Philippov, A.: Security-by-Contract for the OSGi platform. In: Gritzalis, D., Furnell, S., Theoharidou, M. (eds.) SEC 2012. IFIP AICT, vol. 376, pp. 364–375. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Easwaran, A., Kannan, S., Lee, I.: Optimal control of software ensuring safety and functionality. Technical Report MS-CIS-05-20, University of Pennsylvania (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Martinelli, F., Morisset, C.: Quantitative access control with partially-observable markov decision processes. In: Proceedings of CODASPY ’12, pp. 169–180. ACM (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Bielova, N., Massacci, F.: Predictability of enforcement. In: Erlingsson, Ú., Wieringa, R., Zannone, N. (eds.) ESSoS 2011. LNCS, vol. 6542, pp. 73–86. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Dini, G., Martinelli, F., Saracino, A., Sgandurra, D.: MADAM: a multi-level anomaly detector for android malware. In: Kotenko, I., Skormin, V. (eds.) MMM-ACNS 2012. LNCS, vol. 7531, pp. 240–253. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Delahaye, B., Caillaud, B., Legay, A.: Probabilistic contracts: a compositional reasoning methodology for the design of stochastic systems. In: 10th International Conference on Application of Concurrency to System Design (ACSD), 2010, IEEE (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Hoang, X.A., Hu, J.: An efficient hidden Markov model training scheme for anomaly intrusion detection of server applications based on system calls. In: 12th IEEE International Conferecence on Networks, ICON 2004. vol. 2, pp. 470–474. IEEE (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Maggi, F., Matteucci, M., Zanero, S.: Detecting intrusions through system call sequence and argument analysis. IEEE Trans. Dependable Secure Comput. 7(4), 381–395 (2010)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Koresow, A.P.: Intrusion detection via system call traces. Software 14(5), 35–42 (1997)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Briffaut, J., Lefebvre, E., Rouzaud-Cornabas, J., Toinard, C.: PIGA-Virt: an advanced distributed MAC protection of virtual systems. In: Alexander, M., et al. (eds.) Euro-Par 2011, Part II. LNCS, vol. 7156, pp. 416–425. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Daniele Sgandurra .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Dini, G., Martinelli, F., Matteucci, I., Saracino, A., Sgandurra, D. (2014). Introducing Probabilities in Contract-Based Approaches for Mobile Application Security. In: Garcia-Alfaro, J., Lioudakis, G., Cuppens-Boulahia, N., Foley, S., Fitzgerald, W. (eds) Data Privacy Management and Autonomous Spontaneous Security. DPM SETOP 2013 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8247. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54568-9_18

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54568-9_18

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-54567-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-54568-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics