Protecting data on android platform against privilege escalation attack

Abstract

The users of smartphones are rapidly expanding worldwide. These devices have user's security-sensitive data and are ready to communicate with the outside world. Various kinds of malware are attacking smartphones, especially Android phones, but the existing Android security measure does not work satisfactorily. One-third of the current Android malware were privilege escalation attacks, which try to obtain root-privilege to fully compromise the Android security. We propose a detection and prevention scheme that protects Android against such privilege escalation attack that tries to get full access to all data. The proposed scheme monitors important system calls from an application process. If the system call must be called by privileged Android system components in normal operation, the scheme prevent it from executing. The scheme can detect and prevent new and unknown malware as well as currently known one.

Keywords:

• Android
• privilege escalation
• malware
• mount
• system call hooking
• threats

2010 AMS Subject Classifications:

• 97P30
• 68N25

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism(MCST) and from Korea Copyright Commission in 2014, and by the ICT R&D program of MSIP/IITP. [2014(2013-005-016-002), Development of technology for preventing illegal use of android application source code].