An Effective Technique for Protecting Application Data using Security Enhanced (SE) Android in Rooted Android Phones

Youn-sik Jeong, Seong-je Cho

http://doi.org/

This paper analyzes security threats in Security Enhanced (SE) Android and proposes a new technique to efficiently protect application data including private information on rooted Android phones. On an unrooted device, application data can be accessed by the application itself according to the access control models. However, on a rooted device, a root-privileged shell can disable part or all of the access control model enforcement procedures. Therefore, a root-privileged shell can directly access sensitive data of other applications, and a malicious application can leak the data of other applications outside the device. To address this problem, the proposed technique allows only some specific processes to access to the data of other applications including private information by modifying the existing SEAndroid Linux Security Module (LSM) Hook function. Also, a new domain type of process is added to the target system to enforce stronger security rules. In addition, the proposed technique separates the directory type of a newly installed application and the directory type of previously installed applications. Experimental results show that the proposed technique can effectively protect the data of each application and incur performance overhead up to or less than 2 seconds.