An Effective Access Control Scheme for Preventing Permission Leak in Android

In the Android system, each application runs in its own sandbox, and the permission mechanism is used to enforce access control to the system APIs and applications. However, permission leak could happen when an application without certain permission illegally gain access to protected resources through other privileged applications. We propose SPAC, a component-level system permission based access control scheme that can help developers better secure the public components of their applications. In the SPAC scheme, obscure custom permissions are replaced by explicit system permissions. We extend current permission checking mechanism so that multiple permissions are supported on component level. SPAC has been implemented on a Nexus 4 smartphone, and our evaluation demonstrates its effectiveness in mitigating permission leak vulnerabilities.