Wrapdroid: Flexible and fine-grained scheme towards regulating behaviors of android apps

Abstract

Accompanying the wide spread of Android mobile devices and the openness feature of Android ecosystem, untrusted Android apps are flooding into user’s device and prepared to perform various unwanted operations stealthily. To better manage installed apps and secure mobile devices, Android app behaviour regulating schemes are required. In this paper,we presentWrapDroid, a dynamic app behaviour regulating scheme on Android device. Different from other similar approaches, the key components of WrapDroid are implemented based on dynamic memory instrumentation and system call tracing and require no modification to Android system source code. Thus, WrapDroid could be flexibly adopted by Android devices. Moreover, by automatically reconstructing call context of Java or native operations, WrapDroid may provide a full range of control on both java runtime and system call layers of an app. We also develop a WrapDroid prototype and evaluate it on several devices from different mainstream OEMs. Evaluation results show that Wrap- Droid can effectively regulate the behaviors of Android apps according to given policies with negligible performance overhead.