Auditing access to private DATA by android applications

Abstract

"The capabilities of the mobile device are extended in various useful by Android applications. But with the usefulness and swift advancement of Android, its security issues have also become more and more alarming. The more people rely on mobile devices, the more private information about these people can be accessed from their devices. Collection of such private information is one of the most important threats today Android users have. Though the Android operating system is trying to provide few security options to the user, when third-party applications access their sensitive data these options are still insufficient to facilitate users with enough visibility. Most of the approaches that have been proposed to help address this problem either require the underlying Android operating system to be modified or are not available directly on the device which makes it hard to use by the average user. We propose Security Monitor, a tool to detect the sensitive data access events by an application and inform this to the user. Monitor does not require root permission to run on a device. It relies on adding hooks to the application package at the bytecode level. According to our experiments, Monitor can effectively detect private data access of most applications with almost no overhead on power consumption and app perform"