Modeling Android Security using an Extension of Knowledge Discovery Metamodel

Abstract

Due to the exponential growth of the number of mobile users and applications, mobile application development, especially on the Android platform, has received increasing interest in recent years. Since many applications interact with sensitive data, the security aspects of an Android application is attracting growing attention from the research community. However, security aspects have been underestimated by many existing Android applications, and they may need to be redeveloped to include essential security factors. Taking advantage of Model Driven Reverse Engineering (MDRE) into account, we can employ Knowledge Discovery Metamodel (KDM), the most popular metamodel for reverse engineering, to model Android application enhancement. Since KDM lacks Android concepts, it is unable to represent all the details of an existing Android application. To the best of our knowledge, no extension of this metamodel is proposed for modeling the security aspects of an Android application. To address this problem, in this paper, we introduce a heavyweight extension of KDM for the security aspects of the Android application. Our experimental results show that the extended metamodel will facilitate analyzing the security issues of an existing Android application.