The success of Android phones makes them a prominent target for malicious software, in particular since the Android permission system turned out to be inadequate to protect the user against security and privacy threats. This paper presents AppGuard, a powerful and flexible system for the enforcement of user-customizable security policies on untrusted Android applications. AppGuard does not require any changes to a Smartphone’s firmware or root access. The authors’ system offers complete mediation of security-relevant methods based on callee-site inline reference monitoring. They demonstrate the general applicability of AppGuard by several case studies, e.g., removing permissions from overly curious apps as well as defending against several recent real-world attacks on Android phones.
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