A collaborative approach to ensure the security of Android

Abstract

Android is an operating system based on the Linux kernel and it is designed for touchscreen mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers. Google releases android’s source code under a permissive license, this license allows developers freely modify the software. Android has the largest number of applications (apps) available for download in Google Play store, which has over 50billion downloads and 1 million apps published by July 2013. A survey conducted in 2013 shows that Android is the most popular platform among developers; it is used by 71% of the mobile developers. Since Android is an open source platform, so the applications will be sharing their code and data with other applications. In this progress, users cannot decide what permissions the applications should run with.

This report is focused on using a collaborative approach to ensure the security of Android applications. We use Java Pathfinder to enable execution of android applications and we also generating Android-specific drivers to simulate all valid events. By using the approach above we can analysis the report of an android application whether it has any activities that not permitted by users and causes user private information leakage.