Android has empowered third-party apps to access data and services on mobile devices since its genesis. This involves a wide spectrum of user privacy-sensitive data, such as the device ID and location. In recent years, Android has taken proactive measures to adapt its access control policies for such data, in response to the increasingly strict privacy protection regulations around the world. When each new Android version is released, its privacy changes induced by the version evolution are transparently disclosed, and we refer to them as \emph{documented privacy changes} (DPCs). Implementing DPCs in Android OS is a non-trivial task, due to not only the dispersed nature of those access control points within the OS, but also the challenges posed by backward compatibility. As a result, whether the actual access control enforcement in the OS implementations aligns with the disclosed DPCs becomes a critical concern.
In this work, we conduct the first systematic study on the consistency between the \emph{operational behaviors} of the OS at runtime and the \emph{officially disclosed DPCs}. We propose DopCheck, an automatic DPC-driven testing framework equipped with a large language model (LLM) pipeline. It features a serial of analysis to extract the ontology from the privacy change documents written in natural language, and then harnesses the few-shot capability of LLMs to construct test cases for the detection of \emph{DPC-compliance issues} in OS implementations. We apply DopCheck with the latest versions (10 to 13) of Android Open Source Project (AOSP). Our evaluation involving 79 privacy-sensitive APIs demonstrates that DopCheck can effectively recognize DPCs from Android documentation and generate rigorous test cases. Our study reveals that \emph{status quo} of the DPC-compliance issues is concerning, evidenced by 19 bugs identified by DopCheck. Notably, 12 of them are discovered in Android 13 and 6 in Android 10 for the first time, posing more than 35% Android users to the risk of privacy leakage. Our findings should raise an alert to Android users and app developers on the DPC compliance issues when using or developing an app, and would also underscore the necessity for Google to comprehensively validate the actual implementation against its privacy documentation prior to the OS release.
Thu 18 JulDisplayed time zone: Brasilia, Distrito Federal, Brazil change
14:00 - 15:30 | Security and Privacy 1Ideas, Visions and Reflections / Industry Papers / Research Papers at Pitanga Chair(s): Gias Uddin York University, Canada | ||
14:00 18mTalk | Investigating Documented Privacy Changes in Android OS Research Papers Chuan Yan University of Queensland, Mark Huasong Meng National University of Singapore, Fuman Xie University of Queensland, Guangdong Bai University of Queensland | ||
14:18 9mTalk | A Preliminary Study on the Privacy Concerns of Using IP Addresses in Log Data Ideas, Visions and Reflections Issam Sedki Concordia University | ||
14:27 9mTalk | Personal Data-Less Personalized Software Applications Ideas, Visions and Reflections Sana Belguith University of Bristol, Inah Omoronyia University of Bristol, Ruzanna Chitchyan University of Bristol | ||
14:36 18mTalk | Your Code Secret Belongs to Me: Neural Code Completion Tools Can Memorize Hard-coded Credentials Research Papers Yizhan Huang The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Yichen LI The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Weibin Wu Sun Yat-sen University, Jianping Zhang The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Michael Lyu The Chinese University of Hong Kong | ||
14:54 18mTalk | Unveil the Mystery of Critical Software Vulnerabilities Industry Papers Shengyi Pan Zhejiang University, Lingfeng Bao Zhejiang University, Jiayuan Zhou Huawei, Xing Hu Zhejiang University, Xin Xia Huawei Technologies, Shanping Li Zhejiang University | ||
15:12 9mTalk | AgraBOT: Accelerating Third-Party Security Risk Management in Enterprise Setting Industry Papers Mert Toslali IBM Research, Edward Snible IBM Research, Jing Chen IBM Research, Alan Cha IBM Research, USA, Sandeep Singh IBM, Michael Kalantar IBM Research, Srinivasan Parthasarathy IBM Research |