A Secure Communication and Access Control Scheme for Native Libraries of Android Applications

Abstract

The Android system cannot perform fine-grained permission management for TPLs (third-party libraries) in applications. TPLs can use all permissions of the host application, which poses a threat to users and system security. In order to solve this problem, this paper studies the underlying principles of multiple modules in the framework and kernel layers of the Android system. We construct a fine-grained access control scheme for native libraries through technologies such as isolation environment creation, remote function call, and dynamic permission management. We also implement the prototype system. The experimental results show that our proposed scheme can effectively assist developers in managing the permissions of the native libraries in a fine-grained manner and curb the suspicious privileged behaviors of the native libraries. Meanwhile, our proposed scheme is adaptable for high-version Android systems with reasonable overhead, and it will not break the current Android security mechanisms.