The Confused Deputy: (or why capabilities might have been invented)
ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review
On lightweight mobile phone application certification
Proceedings of the 16th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
Large-scale malware indexing using function-call graphs
Proceedings of the 16th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
Apex: extending Android permission model and enforcement with user-defined runtime constraints
ASIACCS '10 Proceedings of the 5th ACM Symposium on Information, 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
Analyzing inter-application communication in Android
MobiSys '11 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services
Taming information-stealing smartphone applications (on Android)
TRUST'11 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Trust and trustworthy computing
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
Quire: lightweight provenance for smart phone operating systems
SEC'11 Proceedings of the 20th USENIX conference on Security
Cells: a virtual mobile smartphone architecture
SOSP '11 Proceedings of the Twenty-Third ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles
L4Android: a generic operating system framework for secure smartphones
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
Detecting repackaged smartphone applications in third-party android marketplaces
Proceedings of the second ACM conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy
Polymorphic worm detection using structural information of executables
RAID'05 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection
MockDroid: trading privacy for application functionality on smartphones
Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications
Unsafe exposure analysis of mobile in-app advertisements
Proceedings of the fifth ACM conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks
Android permissions: a perspective combining risks and benefits
Proceedings of the 17th ACM symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies
RiskRanker: scalable and accurate zero-day android malware detection
Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services
Dissecting Android Malware: Characterization and Evolution
SP '12 Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
Aurasium: practical policy enforcement for Android applications
Security'12 Proceedings of the 21st USENIX conference on Security symposium
AdSplit: separating smartphone advertising from applications
Security'12 Proceedings of the 21st USENIX conference on Security symposium
Security'12 Proceedings of the 21st USENIX conference on Security symposium
PScout: analyzing the Android permission specification
Proceedings of the 2012 ACM conference on Computer and communications security
CHEX: statically vetting Android apps for component hijacking vulnerabilities
Proceedings of the 2012 ACM conference on Computer and communications security
Using probabilistic generative models for ranking risks of Android apps
Proceedings of the 2012 ACM conference on Computer and communications security
CleanOS: limiting mobile data exposure with idle eviction
OSDI'12 Proceedings of the 10th USENIX conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation
AdDroid: privilege separation for applications and advertisers in Android
Proceedings of the 7th ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security
Fast, scalable detection of "Piggybacked" mobile applications
Proceedings of the third ACM conference on Data and application security and privacy
Proceedings of the third ACM conference on Data and application security and privacy
MAST: triage for market-scale mobile malware analysis
Proceedings of the sixth ACM conference on Security and privacy in wireless and mobile networks
AppInk: watermarking android apps for repackaging deterrence
Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGSAC symposium on Information, computer and communications security
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The smartphone market has grown explosively in recent years, as more and more consumers are attracted to the sensor-studded multipurpose devices. Android is particularly ascendant; as an open platform, smartphone manufacturers are free to extend and modify it, allowing them to differentiate themselves from their competitors. However, vendor customizations will inherently impact overall Android security and such impact is still largely unknown. In this paper, we analyze ten representative stock Android images from five popular smartphone vendors (with two models from each vendor). Our goal is to assess the extent of security issues that may be introduced from vendor customizations and further determine how the situation is evolving over time. In particular, we take a three-stage process: First, given a smartphone's stock image, we perform provenance analysis to classify each app in the image into three categories: apps originating from the AOSP, apps customized or written by the vendor, and third-party apps that are simply bundled into the stock image. Such provenance analysis allows for proper attribution of detected security issues in the examined Android images. Second, we analyze permission usages of pre-loaded apps to identify overprivileged ones that unnecessarily request more Android permissions than they actually use. Finally, in vulnerability analysis, we detect buggy pre-loaded apps that can be exploited to mount permission re-delegation attacks or leak private information. Our evaluation results are worrisome: vendor customizations are significant on stock Android devices and on the whole responsible for the bulk of the security problems we detected in each device. Specifically, our results show that on average 85.78% of all pre-loaded apps in examined stock images are overprivileged with a majority of them directly from vendor customizations. In addition, 64.71% to 85.00% of vulnerabilities we detected in examined images from every vendor (except for Sony) arose from vendor customizations. In general, this pattern held over time -- newer smartphones, we found, are not necessarily more secure than older ones.