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Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter Oldenbourg March 15, 2019

In pursuit of a secure UI: The cycle of breaking and fixing Android’s UI

  • Davide Bove

    M. Sc. Davide Bove is a Master’s graduate from Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU). He graduated in the field of Software Engineering and now focuses his studies on secure software, Android security and distributed networks.

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    and Anatoli Kalysch

    M. Sc. Anatoli Kalysch is a PhD student at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU). His research interests include reverse engineering and program analysis, obfuscation techniques, and Android security. Anatoli Kalysch has a M. Sc. in computer science from FAU.

Abstract

Hijacking user clicks and touch gestures has become a common attack vector and offers a stealthy approach at escalating the privileges of a process without raising red flags among users or AV software. Exploits falling into this category are categorized as clickjacking attacks and have gained increased popularity on mobile devices, Android being the recent victim of a series of UI vulnerabilities.

Focusing on the Android OS this paper highlights previous and current UI-based attack vectors and finishes with an overview of security mechanisms, covering both system-wide as well as app-level protection measures.

ACM CCS:

About the authors

M. Sc. Davide Bove

M. Sc. Davide Bove is a Master’s graduate from Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU). He graduated in the field of Software Engineering and now focuses his studies on secure software, Android security and distributed networks.

M. Sc. Anatoli Kalysch

M. Sc. Anatoli Kalysch is a PhD student at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU). His research interests include reverse engineering and program analysis, obfuscation techniques, and Android security. Anatoli Kalysch has a M. Sc. in computer science from FAU.

Acknowledgment

We thank Prof. Dr.-Ing. Freiling and Tobias Groß for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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Received: 2018-08-23
Revised: 2019-01-24
Accepted: 2019-02-28
Published Online: 2019-03-15
Published in Print: 2019-04-24

© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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