The Android OS stack and its vulnerabilities: an empirical study

Autor: Alejandro Mazuera-Rozo, Mario Linares-Vasquez, Sandra Rueda, Jairo Bautista-Mora, Gabriele Bavota
Rok vydání: 2019
Předmět:
Zdroj: Empirical Software Engineering. 24:2056-2101
ISSN: 1573-7616
1382-3256
Popis: The wide and rapid adoption of Android-based devices in the last years has motivated the usage of Android apps to support a broad range of daily activities. In that sense, being the most popular mobile platform makes it an attractive target for security attacks. In fact, 1,489 security vulnerabilities have been reported in the last three years (2015-2017) for the Android OS (which is the underlying platform for Android-based devices). While there is a plethora of approaches and tools for detecting malware and security issues in Android apps, few research has been done to identify, categorize, or detect vulnerabilities in the Android OS. In this paper we present the largest study so far aimed at analyzing software vulnerabilities in the Android OS. In particular, we analyzed a total of 1,235 vulnerabilities from four different perspectives: vulnerability types and their evolution, CVSS vectors that describe the vulnerabilities, impacted Android OS layers, and their survivability across the Android OS history. Based on our findings, we propose a list of future actions that could be performed by researchers and practitioners to reduce the number of vulnerabilities in the Android OS as well as their impact and survivability.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
Externí odkaz: