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A new mitigation approach for covert channel of Android operating system based on permission mechanism

  • WU Jingzheng ,
  • WU Yanjun ,
  • LUO Tianyue ,
  • WU Zhifei ,
  • YANG Mutian ,
  • WANG Yongji
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  • 1. Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China;
    2. National Engineering Research Center for Fundamental Software, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China;
    3. State Key Laboratory of Computer Science, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China

Received date: 2014-10-11

  Revised date: 2015-03-27

  Online published: 2015-09-15

Abstract

About 500 million of smart mobile devices have been sold in China because of the new architecture, secure mechanism, rich sensors, and applications. However, the new features cause a new secure problem named smart mobile device covert channel, which is more dangerous than the traditional attacks and leaks users' privacy. At the present stage there are no elimination and mitigation methods. In this work, the Android covert channels are classified into two models including the shared resource-based Android covert channel and the sensor-based covert channel. The latter one has been carefully studied in this work. The new secure features of permission mechanisms is analyzed and extended to protect the sensors. A new mitigation approach for sensor-based channel is designed and implemented, and the experiments show that the covert channel can be mitigated perfectly.

Cite this article

WU Jingzheng , WU Yanjun , LUO Tianyue , WU Zhifei , YANG Mutian , WANG Yongji . A new mitigation approach for covert channel of Android operating system based on permission mechanism[J]. Journal of University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, 2015 , 32(5) : 667 -675 . DOI: 10.7523/j.issn.2095-6134.2015.05.013

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