Android Authority

Tengfei Tu, Hua Zhang, Bei Gong, Daizhong Du, Qiaoyan Wen

With the continuous development of mobile devices, mobile applications bring a lot of convenience to people’s lives. The abuse of mobile device permissions is prone to the risk of privacy leakage. The existing detection technology can detect the inconsistency between the declared authority and the actual use authority. But using the third-party privacy policy as the analysis basis for SDK permissions will result in a large set of extracted declaration permissions, which will lead to identifying risky applications as normal applications during consistency comparison. The prevailing approach involves utilizing models based on TextCNN to extract information from privacy policies. However, the training of TextCNN relies on large-scale annotated datasets, leading to high costs. This paper uses BERT as the word vector extraction model to obtain private phrases from the privacy policy. And then we use cosine similarity to automatically filter permission phrase samples, reducing the workload of manual labeling. On the other hand, existing methods do not support the analysis of Chinese privacy policies. In order to solve the problem of consistency judgment between Chinese privacy policy and permission usage, we implement a BERT-based Android privacy policy and permission usage consistency analysis engine. The engine first uses static analysis to obtain the permission list of Android applications, and then combines the BERT model to achieve consistency analysis. After functional and speed testing, we found that the engine can successfully run the consistency analysis function of Chinese declaration permissions and usage permissions, and it is better than the existing detection methods.

Jun Song, Mohan Zhang, Chunling Han, Kaixin Wang, Huanguo Zhang

N. Yalcin, T. Yıldırım

Android smartphones largely dominate the smartphone market. For this reason, it is very important to examine these smartphones in terms of digital forensics since they are often used as evidence in trials. It is possible to acquire a physical or logical image of these devices. Acquiring physical and logical images has advantages and disadvantages compared to each other. Creating the logical image is done at the file system level. Analysis can be made on this logical image. Both logical image acquisition and analysis of the image can be done by software tools. In this study, the differences between logical image and physical image acquisition in Android smartphones, their advantages and disadvantages compared to each other, the difficulties that may be encountered in obtaining physical images, which type of image contributes to obtaining more useful and effective data, which one should be preferred for different conditions, and the benefits of having root authority are discussed. The practice of getting the logical image of the Android smartphones and making an analysis on the image is also included. Although root privileges are not required for logical image acquisition, it has been observed that very limited data will be obtained with the logical image created without root privileges. Nevertheless, logical image acquisition has advantages too against physical image acquisition.

Amit H. Choksi, Jaimin J. Sarvan, Ronak Vashi

Harikrishnan P R, P. Periyasamy