Function escalation attack

Abstract

The prevalence of smartphone makes it more important in people’s business and personal life which also helps it to be a target of the malware. In this paper, we introduce a new kind of attack called Function Escalation Attack which obtains functions locally or remotely. We present three threat models: Steganography, Collusion Attack and Code Abusing. A vulnerability in Android filesystem which is used in code abusing threat model is exposed as well. Three proof-of-concept malicious apps are implemented for each threat model. They could bypass static analysis and dynamic analysis. The result shows that function escalation attack could successfully perform malicious tasks such as taking pictures, recording audio and so on.