Journal Article

A static technique for detecting input validation vulnerabilities in Android apps

Zhejun FANG Qixu LIU Yuqing ZHANG Kai WANG Zhiqiang WANG Qianru WU

2017

Overview

Input validation vulnerabilities are common in Android apps, especially in inter-component communications. Malicious attacks can exploit this kind of vulnerability to bypass Android security mechanism and compromise the integrity, confidentiality and availability of Android devices. However, so far there is not a sound approach at the source code level for app developers aiming to detect input validation vulnerabilities in Android apps. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for detecting input validation flaws in Android apps and we implement a prototype named Easy IVD, which provides practical static analysis of Java source code.Easy IVD leverages backward program slicing to extract transaction and constraint slices from Java source code.Then Easy IVD validates these slices with predefined security rules to detect vulnerabilities in a known pattern.To detect vulnerabilities in an unknown pattern, Easy IVD extracts implicit security specifications as frequent patterns from the duplicated slices and verifies them. Then Easy IVD semi-automatically confirms the suspicious rule violations and reports the confirmed ones as vulnerabilities. We evaluate Easy IVD on four versions of original Android apps spanning from version 2.2 to 5.0. It detects 58 vulnerabilities including confused deputy attacks and denial of service attacks. Our results prove that Easy IVD can provide a practical defensive solution for app developers.

• Publisher: Science China Press,Springer Nature B.V
• Subject: Computer networks / Computer Science / Denial of service attacks / Flaw detection / Information Systems and Communication Service / Java / Research Paper / Science / Security / Source code / Static code analysis / 安全技术规范 / 应用程序开发 / 恶意攻击 / 拒绝服务攻击 / 漏洞检测 / 输入 / 静态技术 / 验证