Title
SpanDex: secure password tracking for android
Abstract
This paper presents SpanDex, a set of extensions to Android's Dalvik virtual machine that ensures apps do not leak users' passwords. The primary technical challenge addressed by SpanDex is precise, sound, and efficient handling of implicit information flows (e.g., information transferred by a program's control flow). SpanDex handles implicit flows by borrowing techniques from symbolic execution to precisely quantify the amount of information a process' control flow reveals about a secret. To apply these techniques at runtime without sacrificing performance, SpanDex runs untrusted code in a data-flow sensitive sandbox, which limits the mix of operations that an app can perform on sensitive data. Experiments with a SpanDex prototype using 50 popular Android apps and an analysis of a large list of leaked passwords predicts that for 90% of users, an attacker would need over 80 login attempts to guess their password. Today the same attacker would need only one attempt for all users.
Year
Venue
Field
2014
USENIX Security
Sandbox (computer security),Internet privacy,Virtual machine,Android (operating system),Computer science,Computer security,Login,Control flow,Symbolic execution,Password,Operating system
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
19
1.39
References 
Authors
15
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Landon P. Cox11396109.41
Peter Gilbert289465.21
Geoffrey Lawler3191.39
Valentin Pistol4232.13
Ali Razeen5826.93
Bi Wu6403.28
Sai Cheemalapati7191.39