SEPAL: Towards a Large-scale Analysis of SEAndroid Policy Customization
Dongsong Yu, Guangliang Yang, Guozhu Meng, Xiaorui Gong, Xiu Zhang, Xiaobo Xiang, Xiaoyu Wang, Yue Jiang, Kai Chen, Wei Zou, Wenke Lee, Wenchang Shi · 2021
Nowadays, SEAndroid has been widely deployed in Android devices to enforce security policies and provide flexible mandatory access control (MAC), for the purpose of narrowing down attack surfaces and restricting risky operations. Generally, the original SEAndroid security policy rules are carefully and strictly written and maintained by the Android community. However, in practice, mobile device manufacturers usually have to customize these policy rules and add their own new rules to satisfy their functionality extensions, which breaks the integrity of SEAndroid and causes serious security issues. Still, up to now, it is a challenging task to identify these security issues due to the large and ever-increasing number of policy rules, as well as the complexity of policy semantics.