In this paper we claim that an efficient and readily applicable means to improve privacy of Android applications is: 1) to perform runtime monitoring by instrumenting the application bytecode and 2) in-vivo, i.e. directly on the smartphone. We present a tool chain to do this and present experimental results showing that this tool chain can run on smartphones in a reasonable amount of time and with a realistic effort. Our findings also identify challenges to be addressed before running powerful runtime monitoring and instrumentations directly on smartphones. We implemented two use-cases leveraging the tool chain: BetterPermissions, a fine-grained user centric permission policy system and AdRemover an advertisement remover. Both prototypes improve the privacy of Android systems thanks to in-vivo bytecode instrumentation.
@article{arxiv.1208.4536,
title = {In-Vivo Bytecode Instrumentation for Improving Privacy on Android Smartphones in Uncertain Environments},
author = {Alexandre Bartel and Jacques Klein and Martin Monperrus and Kevin Allix and Yves Le Traon},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1208.4536},
year = {2013}
}