Volume 2 - Issue 3 – 4
An Android Security Extension to Protect Personal Information against Illegal Accesses and Privilege Escalation Attacks
- Yeongung Park
The Attached Institute of ETRI, Yuseong, Daejeon, Korea
santapark@ensec.re.kr
- Chanhee Lee
Dankook University, Yongin-si, Gyeonggi-do, Korea
lchan12@nate.com
- Jonghwa Kim
Dankook University, Yongin-si, Gyeonggi-do, Korea
zcbm4321@dankook.ac.kr
- Seong-Je Cho
Dankook University, Yongin-si, Gyeonggi-do, Korea
sjcho@dankook.ac.kr
- Jongmoo Choi
Dankook University, Yongin-si, Gyeonggi-do, Korea
choijm@dankook.ac.kr
Keywords: Android, permission model, personal information, privilege escalation attack, private data protection
Abstract
Recently, it is widespread for malware to collect sensitive information owned by third-party applica-
tions as well as to escalate its privilege to the system level (the highest level) on the Android platform.
An attack of obtaining root-level privilege in an Android environment can form a serious threat to
users from the viewpoint of breaking down the whole security system. This paper proposes a new
scheme that effectively prevents privilege escalation attacks and protects users’ personal information
in Android. Our proposed scheme can detect and respond to malware that illegally acquires root-
level privilege using pWhitelist, a list of trusted programs with root-level permission. Moreover, the
scheme does not permit even a privileged program to access users’ personal information based on
the principle of least privilege. As a result, it protects personal information against illegal accesses
by malicious applications even though they illegally obtain root-level permissions by exploiting vul-
nerabilities of trusted programs.