Analysis of Usage Patterns and Security Vulnerabilities in Android Permissions and Broadcast Intent Mechanism
Young‐Dong Kim, Ik-Hwan Kim, Taehyoun Kim · Information Security and Cryptology · 2012
Google Android employs a security model based on application permissions to control accesses to system resources and components of other applications from a potentially malicious program. But, this model has security vulnerabilities due to lack of user comprehension and excessive permission requests by 3rd party applications. Broadcast intent message is widely used as a primary means of communication among internal application components. However, this mechanism has also potential security problems because it has no security policy related with it. In this paper, we first present security breach scenarios caused by inappropriate use of application permissions and broadcast intent messages. We then analyze and compare usage patterns of application permissions and broadcast intent message for popular applications on Android market and malwares, respectively. The analysis results show that there exists a characteristic set for application permissions and broadcast intent receiver that are requested by typical malwares. Based on the results, we propose a scheme to detect applications that are suspected as malicious and notify the result to users at installation time.