ShamDroid: gracefully degrading functionality in the presence of limited resource access

ABSTRACT

Given a program whose functionality depends on access to certain external resources, we investigate the question of how to gracefully degrade functionality when a subset of those resources is unavailable. The concrete setting motivating this problem statement is mobile applications, which rely on contextual data (e.g., device identifiers, user location and contacts, etc.) to fulfill their functionality. In particular, we focus on the Android platform, which mediates access to resources via an installation-time permission model. On the one hand, granting an app the permission to access a resource (e.g., the device ID) entails privacy threats (e.g., releasing the device ID to advertising servers). On the other hand, denying access to a resource could render the app useless (e.g., if inability to read the device ID is treated as an error state). Our goal is to specialize an existing Android app in such a way that it is disabled from accessing certain sensitive resources (or contextual data) as specified by the user, while still being able to execute functionality that does not depend on those resources. We present ShamDroid, a program transformation algorithm, based on specialized forms of program slicing, backwards static analysis and constraint solving, that enables the use of Android apps with partial permissions. We rigorously state the guarantees provided by ShamDroid w.r.t. functionality maximization. We provide an evaluation over the top 500 Google Play apps and report on an extensive comparative evaluation of ShamDroid against three other state-of-the-art solutions (APM, XPrivacy, and Google App Ops) that mediate resource access at the system (rather than app) level. ShamDroid performs better than all of these tools by a significant margin, leading to abnormal behavior in only 1 out of 27 apps we manually investigated, compared to the other solutions, which cause crashes and abnormalities in 9 or more of the apps. This demonstrates the importance of performing app-sensitive mocking.

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Index Terms

• General and reference

  • Cross-computing tools and techniques

    • Verification

• Software and its engineering

  • Software creation and management

    • Software development process management

    • Software verification and validation

      • Formal software verification

  • Software organization and properties

    • Software functional properties

      • Formal methods

        • Software verification

• Theory of computation

  • Semantics and reasoning

    • Program reasoning

      • Program verification

    • Program semantics