Android Declassification Infrastructure Matan David Yuval Evron Project Advisor: Roei Schuster 1

Introduction and Project Presentation Unveiled by Google at Based on the Linux OS. Used by 50% of smartphone owners in the U.S. Over 300 million Android devices in use by February Over 850,000 Android devices activated every day. 2

Introduction and Project Presentation Android is an open source platform for designing and developing a wide variety of applications. Android has a large community of developers. Applications are written in Java. Writing apps for Android is easy and very straight- forward: private Camera camera = Camera.open(cameraId); camera.takePicture(null, null, PhotoHandler(getApplicationContext())); 3

Introduction and Project Presentation How can an application “communicate” with different hardware components (Camera, SD Card, etc..)? Introducing: Android’s “PERMISSION" mechanism. 4

Introduction and Project Presentation Perfect, right? Not really!! Android permissions are not very fine grained. A permission can either be given or not, with nothing in between. This presents a problem!!! 5

Introduction and Project Presentation Microsoft deals with this problem by providing an abstraction layer integrated within Windows Phone OS. Microsoft’s “Launchers” and “Choosers” API. As of today, Android does not provide an integral solution. This is where our project comes in! 6

Our Project Does not involve changing the OS infrastructure itself. Identify the most commonly used resources and subdivide the permissions given to apps requesting them. Introduce a new permission mechanism – “A Declassifier”. All this is done in the application layer. This only one (of many) ways we can resolve this issue. 7

Project Goals To enable the development of safer Android programs. Applications utilizing our infrastructure will be less privileged and more secure. No compromise on application functionality. No more “All or Nothing” approach. 8

Success Criteria Achieving the highest number of consumer applications using our infrastructure. We will statistically analyze applications in the Android Market (Google Play) and determine which permission requests, among those relevant, are the most common. Success will be measured by revising consumer applications, limiting their privileges, while preserving their original capabilities. 9

Incremental Stages * Our project is an iterative process. 1.Research, delimitation and development of prototypes. 2.Implementation and testing. 3.Security analyzation and experimentation. 10

Pertinent Literature The Effectiveness of Application Permissions – Adrienne Porter Felt, Kate Greenwood, David Wagner University of California, Berkeley. Understanding Android Security – William Enck, Machigar Ongtang, and Patrick McDaniel Pennsylvania State University. Developing Secure Mobile Applications for Android – Jesse Burns, iSEC Partners 11

Pertinent Technology Launchers and Choosers for Windows Phone – us/library/ff769556%28v=vs.92%29.aspx Android Manifest.permission - element.html element.html Android Intents and Intent Filters – filters.html filters.html Android Activity – ies.html ies.html 12

Related Projects Open Intents – 13

Requisite Tools Android SDK IBM Eclipse ADT Plugin for Eclipse Samsung Galaxy S II 14

Resources and Knowledge Android Dev Guide– Java JDK Documentation Android Application Development Tutorial Having no previous experience with programming for mobile devices, this project requires a “crash course” or OJT in Android development. Several tutorials and a hands on approach will allow us to acquire the necessary knowledge for this project. 15

Risk Factors Despite having previous experience in writing software, this is our first encounter with the Android framework. Competing projects may produce a more secure and more efficient code. 3 rd party application vendors may not be aware of our newly developed infrastructure, thus not developing their applications in accordance with it. Vendors may not want to invest time and money, converting their already written applications to use with our infrastructure. 16

Contingency Plan Being new to Android development, we are unable to correctly identify the complexity level of each declassifier. One may be more demanding than another. Encountering several complex declassifiers may mean we produce less declassifiers than previously anticipated. 17

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