AceDroid: Normalizing Diverse Android Access Control Checks for Inconsistency Detection

Abstract

The Android framework has raised increased security concerns with regards to its access control enforcement. Particularly, existing research efforts successfully demonstrate that framework security checks are not always consistent across app-accessible APIs. However, existing efforts fall short in addressing peculiarities that characterize the complex Android access control and the diversity introduced by the heavy vendor customization. In this paper, we develop a new analysis framework AceDroid that models Android access control in a path-sensitive manner and normalizes diverse checks to a canonical form. We applied our proposed modeling to perform inconsistency analysis for 12 images. Our tool proved to be quite effective, enabling to detect a significant number of inconsistencies introduced by various vendors and to suppress substantial false alarms. Through investigating the results, we uncovered high impact attacks enabling to write a key logger, send premium sms messages, bypass user restrictions, perform a major denial of services and other critical operations.