DyPolDroid: Protecting Users and Organizations from Permission-Abuse Attacks in Android

Android applications are extremely popular, as they are widely used for banking, social media, e-commerce, etc. Such applications typically leverage a series of Permissions, which serve as a convenient abstraction for mediating access to security-sensitive functionality, e.g., sending data over the Internet, within the Android Ecosystem. However, several malicious applications have recently deployed attacks such as data leaks and spurious credit card charges by abusing the Permissions granted initially to them by unaware users in good faith. To alleviate this pressing concern, we present DyPolDroid, a dynamic and semi-automated security framework that builds upon Android Enterprise, a device-management framework for organizations, to allow for users and administrators to design and enforce so-called Counter-Policies, a convenient user-friendly abstraction to restrict the sets of Permissions granted to potential malicious applications, thus effectively protecting against serious attacks without requiring advanced security and technical expertise. Additionally, as a part of our experimental procedures, we introduce Laverna, a fully operational application that uses permissions to provide benign functionality at the same time it also abuses them for malicious purposes. To fully support the reproducibility of our results, and to encourage future work, the source code of both DyPolDroid and Laverna is publicly available as open-source.