Bandera: extracting finite-state models from Java source code
Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on Software engineering
Automatic predicate abstraction of C programs
Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2001 conference on Programming language design and implementation
A simple method for extracting models for protocol code
ISCA '01 Proceedings of the 28th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
POPL '02 Proceedings of the 29th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages
Optimization of Object-Oriented Programs Using Static Class Hierarchy Analysis
ECOOP '95 Proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming
Soot - a Java bytecode optimization framework
CASCON '99 Proceedings of the 1999 conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative research
Behavioral detection of malware on mobile handsets
Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services
Language-based security on Android
Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Fourth Workshop on Programming Languages and Analysis for Security
On lightweight mobile phone application certification
Proceedings of the 16th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
TaintDroid: an information-flow tracking system for realtime privacy monitoring on smartphones
OSDI'10 Proceedings of the 9th USENIX conference on Operating systems design and implementation
The effectiveness of application permissions
WebApps'11 Proceedings of the 2nd USENIX conference on Web application development
A study of android application security
SEC'11 Proceedings of the 20th USENIX conference on Security
Permission re-delegation: attacks and defenses
SEC'11 Proceedings of the 20th USENIX conference on Security
Crowdroid: behavior-based malware detection system for Android
Proceedings of the 1st ACM workshop on Security and privacy in smartphones and mobile devices
Short paper: a look at smartphone permission models
Proceedings of the 1st ACM workshop on Security and privacy in smartphones and mobile devices
Android permissions demystified
Proceedings of the 18th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
Proceedings of the 18th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
MALWARE '11 Proceedings of the 2011 6th International Conference on Malicious and Unwanted Software
Proceedings of the third ACM conference on Data and application security and privacy
SIF: a selective instrumentation framework for mobile applications
Proceeding of the 11th annual international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services
Vetting undesirable behaviors in android apps with permission use analysis
Proceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGSAC conference on Computer & communications security
The impact of vendor customizations on android security
Proceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGSAC conference on Computer & communications security
Sound and precise malware analysis for android via pushdown reachability and entry-point saturation
Proceedings of the Third ACM workshop on Security and privacy in smartphones & mobile devices
Sleeping android: the danger of dormant permissions
Proceedings of the Third ACM workshop on Security and privacy in smartphones & mobile devices
AFrame: isolating advertisements from mobile applications in Android
Proceedings of the 29th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference
Automatic mediation of privacy-sensitive resource access in smartphone applications
SEC'13 Proceedings of the 22nd USENIX conference on Security
WHYPER: towards automating risk assessment of mobile applications
SEC'13 Proceedings of the 22nd USENIX conference on Security
RiskMon: continuous and automated risk assessment of mobile applications
Proceedings of the 4th ACM conference on Data and application security and privacy
Systematic audit of third-party android phones
Proceedings of the 4th ACM conference on Data and application security and privacy
Automatic detection of inter-application permission leaks in Android applications
IBM Journal of Research and Development
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Modern smartphone operating systems (OSs) have been developed with a greater emphasis on security and protecting privacy. One of the mechanisms these systems use to protect users is a permission system, which requires developers to declare what sensitive resources their applications will use, has users agree with this request when they install the application and constrains the application to the requested resources during runtime. As these permission systems become more common, questions have risen about their design and implementation. In this paper, we perform an analysis of the permission system of the Android smartphone OS in an attempt to begin answering some of these questions. Because the documentation of Android's permission system is incomplete and because we wanted to be able to analyze several versions of Android, we developed PScout, a tool that extracts the permission specification from the Android OS source code using static analysis. PScout overcomes several challenges, such as scalability due to Android's 3.4 million line code base, accounting for permission enforcement across processes due to Android's use of IPC, and abstracting Android's diverse permission checking mechanisms into a single primitive for analysis. We use PScout to analyze 4 versions of Android spanning version 2.2 up to the recently released Android 4.0. Our main findings are that while Android has over 75 permissions, there is little redundancy in the permission specification. However, if applications could be constrained to only use documented APIs, then about 22% of the non-system permissions are actually unnecessary. Finally, we find that a trade-off exists between enabling least-privilege security with fine-grained permissions and maintaining stability of the permission specification as the Android OS evolves.