A framework for on-device privilege escalation exploit execution on Android
Sebastian Höbarth, René Mayrhofer · 2011
Exploits on mobile phones can be used for various reasons; a benign one may be to achieve system-level access on a device that was locked by the manufacturer or service provider (also known as ‘jailbreaking ’ or ‘rooting’), while potentially malicious reasons are manifold. Independently of the use case however, a specific exploit is not sufficient to achieve the desired access rights. Typically, exploits provide temporary privilege escalation immediately after their execution. To provide additional access to applications, permanent privilege escalation is required – in the benign case, including secure access control for the user to decide which (parts of) applications are granted elevated access. In this paper, we present a framework that can use arbitrary temporary exploits on Android devices to achieve permanent ‘root ’ capabilities for select (parts of) applications. 1.