Enhancement of Permission Management for an ARM-Android Platform
Rui Chang, Liehui Jiang, Wenzhi Chen, Hongqi He, Shuiqiao Yang · 2016
As the number of smart devices continues to grow dramatically, programmes and data handled by such smart devices have become the primary targets of hackers and malwares. ARM-Android is the most widespread platform for smart devices. Access to privacy-and security-relevant parts of the API is controlled by the corresponding permission in a manifest. However, while requesting access to permissions, these applications may offer opportunities to malicious codes to gain access to other inaccessible resources which will cause a series of security issues. Recently, many researchers focus on the permission-based mechanism which restricts accesses of users and applications to critical resources on an ARM-Android device. Few works among permission analysis, however, pay attention to the prevention of permission leakage on both hardware and software frameworks. In this paper we tackle the challenge of providing our permission-based security architecture on ARM-Android platform. We propose an usage and access control model and an effective method of preventing permission leakage based on ARM TrustZone security extension. In contrast to previous work, the proposed security architecture provides a flexible mandatory access control on Android middleware, Linux kernel, and hardware layers. The evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness in mitigating permission leakage vulnerabilities.