A Survey on Potential Privacy Leaks of GPS Information in Android Applications

....................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...................................................... iv TABLE OF CONTENTS......................................................... v LIST OF TABLES................................................................. ix LIST OF FIGURES............................................................... x CHAPTER 1 INTRODCUTION..................................................1 1.1 Android History...........................................................1 1.2 Pre-Commercial Release Versions......................................3 1.2.1 Alpha Version...................................................3 1.2.2 Beta Version....................................................3 1.3 Outline......................................................................4 1.4 Motivation..................................................................5 1.5 Attacking Procedure.......................................................6 CHAPTER 2 ANDROID ARCHITECTURE..................................8 2.1 Android Security Architecture...........................................8 2.2 System and Kernel Security..............................................9 2.3 Application Security in Android.......................................10 2.4 Sandbox...................................................................11 vi 2.4.1 Functionality...................................................13 2.5 Droidbox..................................................................14 CHAPTER 3 VULNERABILITIES............................................17 3.1 Vulnerabilities of Data Leakage in Android Applications.........17 Data Leak through the Android App Structure..........................17 3.1.1 ContentProvider and Permission............................17 3.1.2 Data Leak through Reverse Engineering...................20 a) Using Dedexer Tool.......................................21 b) Data Leak through Apk Manager........................22 c) Proguard....................................................23 3.2 Vulnerabilities of Data Leakage in Android GPS Applications...24 CHAPTER 4 LEAKAGE DETECTION ANALYSIS......................28 Detecting Leakage Analysis in GPS Applications.......................28 Approaches....................................................................29 4.1 LeakMiner A Static Taint Analysis.................................29 Functionality.............................................................31 4.1.1 Fundamental activity lifecycle callbacks...................31 4.1.2 Activity supplementary callbacks...........................32 4.1.3 Basic service lifecycle callbacks............................32 4.1.4 Service supplementary callbacks............................32 vii 4.2 TaintDroid – a Dynamic Taint approach.............................33 4.3 Detection Leakage through Hybrid Analysis........................38 4.4 Detection Leakage through Cloud based analysis..................39 4.5 Leak Detection through Kynoid........................................41 4.6 DroidVulMon............................................................43 4.6.1Security Architecture for malicious App detection........43 4.7 Overall Comparison....................................................46 CHAPTER 5 ANDROID APPTRCK ME...................................48 5.1 Location Tracking Applications.......................................47 5.2 Case Study................................................................49 5.3 Personalized Android app – Track Me...............................51 Functionality..........................................................51 5.3.1 Welcome Screen...............................................52 5.3.2 Go to application..............................................53 5.3.3 Contacts.........................................................54 5.3.4 Choosing a Contact...........................................55 5.3.5 Start Updating.................................................56 5.3.6 Text Message Notification...................................57 5.3.7 Google Map View.............................................58 viii CHAPTER 6 RECOMMENDATIONS FOR SECURE APPS...............59 CHAPTER 7 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK.....................61 BIBLIOGRAPHY..................................................................62 VITA