A privilege escalation vulnerability checking system for android applications

Abstract

Android is a free, open source mobile platform based on the Linux kernel. The openness of the application platform attracts developers, both benign and malicious. Android depends on privilege separation to isolate applications from each other and from the system. However, a recent research reported that a genuine application exploited at runtime or a malicious application can escalate granted permissions. The attack depends on a carelessly designed application which fails to protect the permissions granted to it. In this research, we propose a vulnerability checking system to check if an application can be potentially leveraged by an attacker to launch such privilege escalation attack. We downloaded 1038 applications from the wild and found 217 potentially vulnerable applications that need further inspection.