TC: Medium: Collaborative Research: Program Analysis for Smartphone Application Security

该项目研究了一种新的方法来描述和推理智能手机应用程序的安全属性。 智能手机变得越来越普及，智能手机应用程序越来越多地用于各种社会，健康，科学和军事目的。然而，这些手机提供的功能，如访问GPS、相机、互联网、日历、联系人和其他敏感信息，可能会导致重大的安全风险。 今天的智能手机开发方法论并不能帮助开发人员构建安全访问敏感资源的应用程序。本项目的目标是开发新的程序分析技术，帮助开发人员在智能手机中表达、推理和执行安全策略。 所提出的技术方法将允许开发人员以直观和灵活的方式定义丰富的安全策略：作为与移动的应用程序交互并检查所需属性的程序代码。 为了确保应用程序代码符合这样的政策，该项目正在寻求几种技术，利用静态和动态程序分析的最新进展。 该项目还在研究为特定应用程序自动合成基于代码的策略的方法。该项目正在Google的Android操作系统中实例化这些想法，并正在评估这些想法在广泛的基于Android的智能手机应用程序上的有效性和性能。

This project investigates a new approach for describing and reasoning about security properties of smartphone applications. Smartphones are becoming pervasive, and smartphone applications are increasingly used for a variety of social, health, scientific, and military purposes. However, the capabilities these phones provide, such as access to GPS, camera, Internet, calendar, contacts, and other sensitive information can lead to major security risks. Today's smartphone development methodologies do little to help developers construct applications that safely access sensitive resources.The goal of this project is to develop new program analysis techniques that can help developers express, reason about, and enforce security policies in smartphones. The proposed technical approach will allow developers to define rich security policies in an intuitive and flexible manner: as program code that interacts with a mobile application and checks desired properties. To ensure that application code conforms to such policies, the project is pursuing several techniques that leverage recent advances in static and dynamic program analysis. The project is also investigating approaches to automatically synthesize a code-based policy for a given application. The project is instantiating these ideas in the context of Google's Android operating system, and is evaluating the ideas in terms of effectiveness and performance on a broad range of Android-based smartphone applications.