Prevention of cross-update privacy leaks on android
Beumjin Cho, Sangho Lee, Meng Xu, Sangwoo Ji, Taesoo Kim, Jong Kyoung Kim · Computer Science and Information Systems · 2017
Updating applications is an important mechanism to enhance their availability, functionality, and security. However, without careful considerations, application updates can bring other security problems. In this paper, we consider a novel attack that exploits application updates on Android: a cross-update privacy-leak attack called COUPLE. The COUPLE attack allows an application to secretly leak sensitive data through the cross-update interaction between its old and new versions; each version only has permissions and logic for either data collection or transmission to evade detection. We implement a runtime security system, BREAKUP, that prevents cross-update sensitive data transactions by tracking permission-use histories of individual applications. Evaluation results show that BREAKUP?s time overhead is below 5%. We further show the feasibility of the COUPLE attack by analyzing the versions of 2;009 applications (28;682 APKs).