NDLI: ShamDroid: gracefully degrading functionality in the presence of limited resource access

Content Provider	ACM Digital Library
Author	Tripp, Omer Ferrara, Pietro Pistoia, Marco Brutschy, Lucas
Abstract	Given a program whose functionality depends on access to certain external resources, we investigate the question of how to gracefully degrade functionality when a subset of those resources is unavailable. The concrete setting motivating this problem statement is mobile applications, which rely on contextual data (e.g., device identifiers, user location and contacts, etc.) to fulfill their functionality. In particular, we focus on the Android platform, which mediates access to resources via an installation-time permission model. On the one hand, granting an app the permission to access a resource (e.g., the device ID) entails privacy threats (e.g., releasing the device ID to advertising servers). On the other hand, denying access to a resource could render the app useless (e.g., if inability to read the device ID is treated as an error state). Our goal is to specialize an existing Android app in such a way that it is disabled from accessing certain sensitive resources (or contextual data) as specified by the user, while still being able to execute functionality that does not depend on those resources. We present ShamDroid, a program transformation algorithm, based on specialized forms of program slicing, backwards static analysis and constraint solving, that enables the use of Android apps with partial permissions. We rigorously state the guarantees provided by ShamDroid w.r.t. functionality maximization. We provide an evaluation over the top 500 Google Play apps and report on an extensive comparative evaluation of ShamDroid against three other state-of-the-art solutions (APM, XPrivacy, and Google App Ops) that mediate resource access at the system (rather than app) level. ShamDroid performs better than all of these tools by a significant margin, leading to abnormal behavior in only 1 out of 27 apps we manually investigated, compared to the other solutions, which cause crashes and abnormalities in 9 or more of the apps. This demonstrates the importance of performing app-sensitive mocking.
Starting Page	316
Ending Page	331
Page Count	16
File Format	PDF
ISSN	03621340 15581160
DOI	10.1145/2858965.2814296
Journal	ACM SIGPLAN Notices (SIGP)
Volume Number	50
Issue Number	10
Language	English
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Publisher Date	1983-05-01
Publisher Place	New York
Access Restriction	One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Subject Keyword	Privacy Static program analysis Android applications
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design Software

Sl.	Authority	Responsibilities	Communication Details
1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
2	Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	Host Institute of the Project: The host institute of the project is responsible for providing infrastructure support and hosting the project	https://www.iitkgp.ac.in
3	National Digital Library of India Office, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	The administrative and infrastructural headquarters of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in
4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
5	Website/Portal (Helpdesk)	Queries regarding NDLI and its services	support@ndl.gov.in
6	Contents and Copyright Issues	Queries related to content curation and copyright issues	content@ndl.gov.in
7	National Digital Library of India Club (NDLI Club)	Queries related to NDLI Club formation, support, user awareness program, seminar/symposium, collaboration, social media, promotion, and outreach	clubsupport@ndl.gov.in
8	Digital Preservation Centre (DPC)	Assistance with digitizing and archiving copyright-free printed books	dpc@ndl.gov.in
9	IDR Setup or Support	Queries related to establishment and support of Institutional Digital Repository (IDR) and IDR workshops	idr@ndl.gov.in

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