skip to main content
10.1145/3551349.3559524acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesaseConference Proceedingsconference-collections
short-paper

AUSERA: Automated Security Vulnerability Detection for Android Apps

Published: 05 January 2023 Publication History

Abstract

To reduce the attack surface from app source code, massive tools focus on detecting security vulnerabilities in Android apps. However, some obvious weaknesses have been highlighted in the previous studies. For example, (1) most of the available tools such as AndroBugs, MobSF, Qark, and Super use pattern-based methods to detect security vulnerabilities. Although they are effective in detecting some types of vulnerabilities, a large number of false positives would be introduced, which inevitably increases the patching overhead for app developers. (2) Similarly, static taint analysis tools such as FlowDroid and IccTA present hundreds of vulnerability candidates of data leakage instead of confirmed vulnerabilities. (3) Last but not least, a relatively complete vulnerability taxonomy is missing, which would introduce a lot of false negatives. In this paper, based on our prior knowledge in this research domain, we empirically propose a vulnerability taxonomy as the baseline and then extend AUSERA by augmenting the detection capability to 50 security vulnerability types. Meanwhile, a new benchmark dataset including all these 50 vulnerability types is constructed to demonstrate the effectiveness of AUSERA. The tool and datasets are available at https://github.com/tjusenchen/AUSERA and the demonstration video can be found at https://youtu.be/UCiGwVaFPpY.

References

[1]
2015. AndroBugs. https://github.com/AndroBugs/AndroBugs_Framework
[2]
2016. DIVA App. https://github.com/payatu/diva-android
[3]
2017. JAADAS. https://github.com/flankerhqd/JAADAS
[4]
2018. Qark. https://github.com/linkedin/qark
[5]
2018. Super. https://github.com/SUPERAndroidAnalyzer/super
[6]
2020. MSTG App. https://github.com/OWASP/MSTG-Hacking-Playground
[7]
2022. Common Weakness Enumeration: CWE. https://cwe.mitre.org/
[8]
2022. CVE. https://cve.mitre.org/
[9]
2022. Mobile NIST. https://www.nist.gov/mobile
[10]
2022. MobSF. https://github.com/MobSF/Mobile-Security-Framework-MobSF
[11]
2022. OWASP. https://owasp.org/
[12]
2022. Scantist Pte. Ltd.https://scantist.io/
[13]
Steven Arzt, Siegfried Rasthofer, Christian Fritz, Eric Bodden, Alexandre Bartel, Jacques Klein, Yves Le Traon, Damien Octeau, and Patrick McDaniel. 2014. Flowdroid: Precise context, flow, field, object-sensitive and lifecycle-aware taint analysis for android apps. Acm Sigplan Notices 49, 6 (2014), 259–269.
[14]
Sen Chen, Lingling Fan, Chunyang Chen, and Yang Liu. 2022. Automatically Distilling Storyboard with Rich Features for Android Apps. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering(2022).
[15]
Sen Chen, Lingling Fan, Chunyang Chen, Ting Su, Wenhe Li, Yang Liu, and Lihua Xu. 2019. Storydroid: Automated generation of storyboard for Android apps. In 2019 IEEE/ACM 41st International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). IEEE, 596–607.
[16]
Sen Chen, Lingling Fan, Guozhu Meng, Ting Su, Minhui Xue, Yinxing Xue, Yang Liu, and Lihua Xu. 2020. An empirical assessment of security risks of global Android banking apps. In 2020 IEEE/ACM 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). IEEE, 1310–1322.
[17]
Sen Chen, Ting Su, Lingling Fan, Guozhu Meng, Minhui Xue, Yang Liu, and Lihua Xu. 2018. Are mobile banking apps secure? what can be improved?. In Proceedings of the 2018 26th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering. 797–802.
[18]
Li Li, Alexandre Bartel, Tegawendé F Bissyandé, Jacques Klein, Yves Le Traon, Steven Arzt, Siegfried Rasthofer, Eric Bodden, Damien Octeau, and Patrick McDaniel. 2015. Iccta: Detecting inter-component privacy leaks in Android apps. In 2015 IEEE/ACM 37th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, Vol. 1. IEEE, 280–291.
[19]
Xian Zhan, Lingling Fan, Sen Chen, Feng We, Tianming Liu, Xiapu Luo, and Yang Liu. 2021. ATVhunter: Reliable Version Detection of Third-party Libraries for Vulnerability Identification in Android Applications. In 2021 IEEE/ACM 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). IEEE, 1695–1707.
[20]
Xian Zhan, Lingling Fan, Tianming Liu, Sen Chen, Li Li, Haoyu Wang, Yifei Xu, Xiapu Luo, and Yang Liu. 2020. Automated third-party library detection for Android applications: Are we there yet?. In 2020 35th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE). IEEE, 919–930.

Cited By

View all

Index Terms

  1. AUSERA: Automated Security Vulnerability Detection for Android Apps

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Other conferences
    ASE '22: Proceedings of the 37th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
    October 2022
    2006 pages
    ISBN:9781450394758
    DOI:10.1145/3551349
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 05 January 2023

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. Android Apps
    2. Security Vulnerability
    3. Vulnerability Detection

    Qualifiers

    • Short-paper
    • Research
    • Refereed limited

    Funding Sources

    Conference

    ASE '22

    Acceptance Rates

    Overall Acceptance Rate 82 of 337 submissions, 24%

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)167
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)22
    Reflects downloads up to 25 Jan 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all

    View Options

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    HTML Format

    View this article in HTML Format.

    HTML Format

    Figures

    Tables

    Media

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media