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.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
Hermanns, H., Parma, A., Segala, R., Wachter, B., Zhang, L.: Probabilistic logical characterization. Inf. Comput. 209(2), 154–172 (2011)
Baier, C., Engelen, B., Majster-Cederbaum, M.: Deciding bisimilarity and similarity for probabilistic processes. J. Comput. Syst. Sci. 60(1), 187–231 (2000)
Sharkey, M.I.: Probabilistic proof-carrying code. Ph.D. thesis, Carleton University (2012)
Tsukada, Y.: Interactive and probabilistic proof of mobile code safety. Autom. Software Eng. 12(2), 237–257 (2005)
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)
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)
Juniper Networks Global Threat Center: Malicious Mobile Threats Report 2010/2011 (2011)
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)
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
Dragoni, N., Massacci, F.: Security-by-contract for web services. In: SWS, pp. 90–98 (2007)
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)
Easwaran, A., Kannan, S., Lee, I.: Optimal control of software ensuring safety and functionality. Technical Report MS-CIS-05-20, University of Pennsylvania (2005)
Martinelli, F., Morisset, C.: Quantitative access control with partially-observable markov decision processes. In: Proceedings of CODASPY ’12, pp. 169–180. ACM (2012)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
Koresow, A.P.: Intrusion detection via system call traces. Software 14(5), 35–42 (1997)
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)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights 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)