English

Detecting Data Leakage from Databases on Android Apps with Concept Drift

Cryptography and Security 2018-05-31 v1 Databases

Abstract

Mobile databases are the statutory backbones of many applications on smartphones, and they store a lot of sensitive information. However, vulnerabilities in the operating system or the app logic can lead to sensitive data leakage by giving the adversaries unauthorized access to the app's database. In this paper, we study such vulnerabilities to define a threat model, and we propose an OS-version independent protection mechanism that app developers can utilize to detect such attacks. To do so, we model the user behavior with the database query workload created by the original apps. Here, we model the drift in behavior by comparing probability distributions of the query workload features over time. We then use this model to determine if the app behavior drift is anomalous. We evaluate our framework on real-world workloads of three different popular Android apps, and we show that our system was able to detect more than 90% of such attacks.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1805.11780,
  title  = {Detecting Data Leakage from Databases on Android Apps with Concept Drift},
  author = {Gokhan Kul and Shambhu Upadhyaya and Varun Chandola},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.11780},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

This paper is accepted to be published in the proceedings of IEEE TrustCom 2018

R2 v1 2026-06-23T02:12:49.386Z