Parjanya Vyas, Asim Waheed, Yousra Aafer, and N. Asokan, University of Waterloo
In this work, we explore auditing access control implementations of Android private framework APIs by leveraging app-side security specifications. The seemingly straightforward auditing task faces significant challenges. It requires extracting unconventional security indicators and understanding their relevance to private framework APIs. More importantly, addressing these challenges requires relying on uncertain hints. We hence, introduce Bluebird, a security auditing platform for Android APIs, that mimics a human expert. Bluebird seamlessly fuses human-like understanding of app-side logic with statically-derived program semantics using probabilistic inference to detect access control gaps in private APIs.
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author = {Parjanya Vyas and Asim Waheed and Yousra Aafer and N. Asokan},
title = {Auditing Framework {APIs} via Inferred App-side Security Specifications},
booktitle = {32nd USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 23)},
year = {2023},
isbn = {978-1-939133-37-3},
address = {Anaheim, CA},
pages = {6061--6077},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity23/presentation/vyas},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = aug
}