Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

6-2018

Abstract

As feature-rich Android applications (apps for short) are increasingly popularized in security-sensitive scenarios, methods to verify their security properties are highly desirable. Existing approaches on verifying Android apps often have limited effectiveness. For instance, static analysis often suffers from a high false-positive rate, whereas approaches based on dynamic testing are limited in coverage. In this work, we propose an alternative approach, which is to apply the software model checking technique to verify Android apps. We have built a general framework named DroidPF upon Java PathFinder (JPF), towards model checking Android apps. In the framework, we craft an executable mock-up Android OS which enables JPF to dynamically explore the concrete state spaces of the tested apps; we construct programs to generate user interaction and environmental input so as to drive the dynamic execution of the apps; and we introduce Android specific reduction techniques to help alleviate the state space explosion. DroidPF focuses on common security vulnerabilities in Android apps including sensitive data leakage involving a non-trivial flow- and context-sensitive taint-style analysis. DroidPF has been evaluated with 131 apps, which include real-world apps, third-party libraries, malware samples and benchmarks for evaluating app analysis techniques like ours. DroidPF precisely identifies nearly all of the previously known security issues and nine previously unreported vulnerabilities/bugs.

Discipline

Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering

Volume

44

Issue

6

First Page

595

Last Page

612

ISSN

0098-5589

Identifier

10.1109/TSE.2017.2697848

Publisher

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2017.2697848

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