7 Ways to Hang Yourself with Google Android

Architecture and Background

According to Google, Android was designed to give mobile developers "an excellent software platform for everyday users" on which to build rich applications for the growing mobile device market. The power and flexibility of the Android platform are undeniable, but where does it leave developers when it comes to security? In this talk we discuss seven of the most interesting code--level security mistakes we've seen developers make in Android applications. We cover common errors ranging from the promiscuous or incorrect use of Android permissions to lax input validation that enables a host of exploits, such as query string injection.

Vulnerability Analysis

We discuss the root cause of each vulnerability, describe how attackers might exploit it, and share the results of our research applying static analysis to identify the issue. Specifically, we will show our successes and failures using static analysis to identify each type of vulnerability in real-world Android applications. Yekaterina Tsipenyuk O'Neil is the founding member of the Security Research Group at Fortify Software, where she is responsible for performing code audits, identifying and analyzing insecure coding patterns, providing security content for Fortify's software security products, and researching ways to improve the quality of the tools. Outside of the office, Yekaterina spends time working with customers and speaking at conferences.

Exploitation and Demonstrations

Yekaterina has a B.S. and an M.S. in computer science from the University of California, San Diego. Her thesis work focused on mobile agent security.

Remediation and Defensive Strategies

Erika Chin is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She is in the security research group, and her current research interest is improving mobile phone security. In particular, she is interested in addressing developer confusion and difficulty that lead to vulnerabilities in mobile phone applications. She recently presented at MobiSys on vulnerabilities stemming from inter-application communication in Android.