Poster: A new framework against privilege escalation attacks on Android

Abstract

The Android provides a permission-based security model to restrict the operations that each application can perform; however, it has been shown to be vulnerable to privilege escalation attacks. Applications can cooperate to perform operations that forbidden to perform separately which may lead to privacy leakage. In this poster, we present the design of a new policy-centered security framework against the application-level privilege escalation attacks. Different from previous policy-centered schemes, the communication content is also considered into the inspection besides the permissions. Specially, we allow the privacy information selectively to be passed in the middleware and deploy a mandatory access control at the kernel based on the dynamical taint tracking. Test results show that it can prevent known confused deputy attacks and is also flexible to prevent the unknowns; furthermore it can reduce the false positives of preventing colluding attacks compared to the previous work. © 2013 Authors.