A Certification Process for Android Applications
The last decade has seen the emergence of mobile platform for software applications. An important factor in the remarkable growth in this area is the development of Android and a community of mobile application developers sharing open sourced and free sof
- PDF / 402,731 Bytes
- 16 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 24 Downloads / 195 Views
2
Digital Security and Forensics (SaFe) Research Group, Department of Computing, Faculty of Engineering and Computing, Coventry University, Coventry, UK {kalutarh,s.shaikh}@coventry.ac.uk Centre for Software Assurance, Bond University, Gold Coast, QLD 4229, Australia [email protected]
Abstract. The last decade has seen the emergence of mobile platform for software applications. An important factor in the remarkable growth in this area is the development of Android and a community of mobile application developers sharing open sourced and free software. While the emphasis for Android has been openness and user control, this brings with it challenges of validating and securing mobile apps. Development of dedicated tools and techniques to test mobile apps for functional and nonfunctional properties has been limited so far. Such an effort is made more difficult given frequent version updates for Android in its short history (over ten in ten years). The need for better security and assurance for mobile apps, on the other hand, is ever so more as apps providing important services such as banking, navigation, and identity management emerge. This paper attempts to converge on current concepts and practices of testing mobile apps. We provide a structured checklist approach to vulnerability assessment and permission mapping of mobile apps, which is underpinned by a set of available tools, and ultimately contribute to a framework for certification of mobile apps. The proposed certification process combines diverse sources and has a focus on automation.
1
Introduction
The last decade has seen the emergence of mobile platform for software applications. This has been helped by global telecommunication networks, offering ever increasing traffic capacity and coverage, along with remarkable developments in mobile processing performance in new generation smartphones and tablets. An equally important factor contributing to this growth is the development of open sourced operating systems, such as Android, and the support such platforms encouraging a community of mobile application (“app”) developers sharing software and utilities for free public use. The Android initiative is led by Google and has a market share of over 50 % [5]. With nearly 5 million mobile apps available for worldwide distribution over the Android platform, estimates suggest that by the end of December 2011 over 10 billion apps have been downloaded [3]. Given the increase in mobile devices (including phones and tablets) software for the mobile platform will become a significant issue. A. Cerone et al. (Eds.): SEFM 2012 Satellite Events, LNCS 7991, pp. 288–303, 2014. c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014 DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-54338-8 24,
A Certification Process for Android Applications
289
The developer community welcomes the emphasis on openness and user control for development and distribution over the Android platform. While this is a factor in its growth and adoption, it brings with it the challenge of validating and securing apps [19]. Development of dedi
Data Loading...
