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Register a new userSEPAL: Towards a Large-scale Analysis of SEAndroid Policy Customization
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Added by
Guozhu Meng
Publication date
2021
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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To investigate the status quo of SEAndroid policy customization, we propose SEPAL, a universal tool to automatically retrieve and examine the customized policy rules. SEPAL applies the NLP technique and employs and trains a wide&deep model to quickly and precisely predict whether one rule is unregulated or not.Our evaluation shows SEPAL is effective, practical and scalable. We verify SEPAL outperforms the state of the art approach (i.e., EASEAndroid) by 15% accuracy rate on average. In our experiments, SEPAL successfully identifies 7,111 unregulated policy rules with a low false positive rate from 595,236 customized rules (extracted from 774 Android firmware images of 72 manufacturers). We further discover the policy customization problem is getting worse in newer Andro
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Android adopted SELinuxs mandatory access control (MAC) mechanisms in 2013. Since then, billions of Android devices have benefited from mandatory access control security policies. These policies are expressed in a variety of rules, maintained by Google and extended by Android OEMs. Over the years, the rules have grown to be quite complex, making it challenging to properly understand or configure these policies. In this paper, we perform a measurement study on the SEAndroid repository to understand the evolution of these policies. We propose a new metric to measure the complexity of the policy by expanding policy rules, with their abstraction features such as macros and groups, into primitive boxes, which we then use to show that the complexity of the SEAndroid policies has been growing exponentially over time. By analyzing the Git commits, snapshot by snapshot, we are also able to analyze the age of policy rules, the trend of changes, and the contributor composition. We also look at hallmark events in Androids history, such as the Stagefright vulnerability in Androids media facilities, pointing out how these events led to changes in the MAC policies. The growing complexity of Androids mandatory policies suggests that we will eventually hit the limits of our ability to understand these policies, requiring new tools and techniques.
The task of designing secure software systems is fraught with uncertainty, as data on uncommon attacks is limited, costs are difficult to estimate, and technology and tools are continually changing. Consequently, experts may interpret the security risks posed to a system in different ways, leading to variation in assessment. This paper presents research into measuring the variability in decision making between security professionals, with the ultimate goal of improving the quality of security advice given to software system designers. A set of thirty nine cyber-security experts took part in an exercise in which they independently assessed a realistic system scenario. This study quantifies agreement in the opinions of experts, examines methods of aggregating opinions, and produces an assessment of attacks from ratings of their components. We show that when aggregated, a coherent consensus view of security emerges which can be used to inform decisions made during systems design.
Software defined networking (SDN) has been adopted to enforce the security of large-scale and complex networks because of its programmable, abstract, centralized intelligent control and global and real-time traffic view. However, the current SDN-based security enforcement mechanisms require network managers to fully understand the underlying configurations of network. Facing the increasingly complex and huge SDN networks, we urgently need a novel security policy management mechanism which can be completely transparent to any underlying information. That is it can permit network managers to define upper-level security policies without containing any underlying information of network, and by means of model transformation system, these upper-level security policies can be transformed into their corresponding lower-level policies containing underlying information automatically. Moreover, it should ensure system model updated by the generated lower-level policies can hold all of security properties defined in upper-level policies. Based on these insights, we propose a security policy model transformation and verification approach for SDN in this paper. We first present the formal definition of a security policy model (SPM) which can be used to specify the security policies used in SDN. Then, we propose a model transformation system based on SDN system model and mapping rules, which can enable network managers to convert SPM model into corresponding underlying network configuration policies automatically, i.e., flow table model (FTM). In order to verify SDN system model updated by the generated FTM models can hold the security properties defined in SPM models, we design a security policy verification system based on model checking. Finally, we utilize a comprehensive case to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed approach.
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