On lightweight mobile phone application certification

TLDR

The proliferation of mobile applications driven by handset and network advances has increased the risk of installing Trojans and other malware. This work introduces Kirin, a lightweight Android security service that certifies apps at install time to reduce malware exposure. Kirin applies security rule templates, derived through security requirements engineering, to conservatively match undesirable properties in an app’s bundled configuration. Testing 311 popular Android Market apps, Kirin identified five with dangerous functionality and five with risky rights, demonstrating that app security configurations can effectively detect malware.

Abstract

Users have begun downloading an increasingly large number of mobile phone applications in response to advancements in handsets and wireless networks. The increased number of applications results in a greater chance of installing Trojans and similar malware. In this paper, we propose the Kirin security service for Android, which performs lightweight certification of applications to mitigate malware at install time. Kirin certification uses security rules, which are templates designed to conservatively match undesirable properties in security configuration bundled with applications. We use a variant of security requirements engineering techniques to perform an in-depth security analysis of Android to produce a set of rules that match malware characteristics. In a sample of 311 of the most popular applications downloaded from the official Android Market, Kirin and our rules found 5 applications that implement dangerous functionality and therefore should be installed with extreme caution. Upon close inspection, another five applications asserted dangerous rights, but were within the scope of reasonable functional needs. These results indicate that security configuration bundled with Android applications provides practical means of detecting malware.