Context Awareness through Reasoning on Private Analysis for Android Application

Smartphone contains diverse sensitive private information, such as phone number, contact and credit. The Android platform employs permission mechanism to protect intensive information from illegal leakage. There are several tools to assist users to manage apps´ permissions, such as App Ops, Privacy Guard, and XPrivacy. However, the permission mechanism of Android is complicated, and only a few of smartphone users are familiar with Android security mechanism. In addition, it is difficult for smartphone users to know whether the privacy information exposure by Android applications is legal or not. Reverse engineering and program data flow analysis are basic approaches to analysis applications. Although it needs analysts to manual analysis results, its efficiency is largely depends on analysts´ skills and experience. To improve analysis efficiency, we take a case-based reasoning method to simulation the security expert analysis applications. We translate the result of Android static analysis tools into cases and build a case reasoning library. Experiments show that it can help analysts to aid analysis Android applications.