Security Analysis and Vulnerability Detection of Gesture-Based Lock in Android Applications
Yu Wang, Yuqing Zhang, Kai Wang, Jingbo Yan · 2016
Gesture-based lock plays an important role in many Android applications to prevent unauthorized access. Unfortunately, application developers tend to abuse some features provided by Android platform and neglect their influence on the security. This may result in fatal vulnerabilities which can be exploited to bypass gesture-based lock. In this paper, we focus on the vulnerabilities of gesture-based locks in Android applications and propose a dynamic testing tool named Lock-Breaker to detect them. We test 63 popular applications from android markets using Lock-Breaker. The results show that 28 out of these 63 applications are facing security threats, and 13 of the 28 applications have obvious vulnerabilities. In the end, we make some suggestions on defence for vulnerabilities in gesture-based locks to help enhance the security of android applications.