research-article

Automated, Dynamic Android App Vulnerability and Privacy Leak Analysis: Design Considerations, Required Components and Available Tools

Authors:

Jens HeiderAuthors Info & Claims

EICC '21: Proceedings of the 2021 European Interdisciplinary Cybersecurity Conference

Pages 1 - 6

https://doi.org/10.1145/3487405.3487652

Published: 22 November 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Smartphones apps aid humans in plenty of situations. There exists an app for everything. However, without the user’s awareness, some apps contain vulnerabilities or leak private data. Static and dynamic app analysis are ways to find these software properties. Especially setting up a dynamic analysis environment is not a trivial task. Several peculiarities of Android have to be considered, existing tools for different aspects have to be evaluated, selected and setup to work together. Existing literature is often outdated and only covers tools for one aspect but doesn’t combine them together in a big picture. This paper presents a generic design for an automated dynamic app analysis environment and highlights the required components as well as functionality to reveal security and privacy issues. Available tools are listed, realizing different aspects of the proposed environment design. Tool features are evaluated and tool usability for an automated large scale dynamic app analysis is compared. This document should serve as a reference to all who need to implement dynamic analysis on Android (or some aspects) and require an overview of available and usable solutions.

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Cited By

Ling YHao YWang YWang KBai GDong J(2024)Essential or Excessive? MINDAEXT: Measuring Data Minimization Practices among Browser Extensions2024 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)10.1109/SANER60148.2024.00104(964-975)Online publication date: 12-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/SANER60148.2024.00104
Tu TZhang HGong BDu DWen Q(2024)Intelligent analysis of android application privacy policy and permission consistencyArtificial Intelligence Review10.1007/s10462-024-10798-z57:7Online publication date: 13-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-024-10798-z
Heid KHeider J(2022)Context Correlation for Automated Dynamic Android App Analysis to Improve Impact Rating of Privacy and Security FlawsRisks and Security of Internet and Systems10.1007/978-3-031-31108-6_1(1-17)Online publication date: 7-Dec-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-31108-6_1

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Automated, Dynamic Android App Vulnerability and Privacy Leak Analysis: Design Considerations, Required Components and Available Tools

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EICC '21: Proceedings of the 2021 European Interdisciplinary Cybersecurity Conference

November 2021

97 pages

ISBN:9781450390491

DOI:10.1145/3487405

Copyright © 2021 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 22 November 2021

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German Federal Ministry of Education and Research

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EICC '21

EICC '21: European Interdisciplinary Cybersecurity Conference

November 10 - 11, 2021

Virtual Event, Romania

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Cited By

Ling YHao YWang YWang KBai GDong J(2024)Essential or Excessive? MINDAEXT: Measuring Data Minimization Practices among Browser Extensions2024 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)10.1109/SANER60148.2024.00104(964-975)Online publication date: 12-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/SANER60148.2024.00104
Tu TZhang HGong BDu DWen Q(2024)Intelligent analysis of android application privacy policy and permission consistencyArtificial Intelligence Review10.1007/s10462-024-10798-z57:7Online publication date: 13-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-024-10798-z
Heid KHeider J(2022)Context Correlation for Automated Dynamic Android App Analysis to Improve Impact Rating of Privacy and Security FlawsRisks and Security of Internet and Systems10.1007/978-3-031-31108-6_1(1-17)Online publication date: 7-Dec-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-31108-6_1

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