A Lightweight Dynamic Enforcement of Privacy Protection for Android

Abstract

Inter-process communication (IPC) provides a message passing mechanism for information exchange between applications. It has been long believed that IPCs can be abused by malware writers to launch collusive information leak using two or more applications. Much work on privacy protection focuses on the simple information leak caused by the individual applications and lacks effective approaches to preventing the collusive information leak caused by IPCs between multiple processes. In this paper, we propose a hybrid approach to prevent the collusive information leak based on information flow control. Our approach combines static information flow analysis and dynamic runtime checking together. Information leak caused by individual processes is prevented through static information flow control, and dynamic checking is done at runtime to prevent the collusive information leak. Such a combination may effectively reduce the runtime overhead of pure dynamic checking, and reduce false-alarms in pure static analysis. We develop this approach based on an abstract and simplified programming model, and formalize a novel definition of the leak-freedom property as our target security property. A simulation-based proof technique is used to prove that our approach is able to guarantee leak-freedom. All proofs are mechanized in Coq.