From System Services Freezing to System Server Shutdown in Android: All You Need Is a Loop in an App

The Android OS not only dominates 78.6% of the worldwide smartphone market in 2014, but importantly has been widely used for mission critical tasks (e.g., medical devices, auto/aircraft navigators, embedded in satellite project). The core of Android, System Server (SS), is a multi-threaded process that contains most of the system services and provides the essential functionalities to support applications (apps). Considering the complicated design of the SS and its easily-accessible system services (e.g., via Android APIs), we conjecture that the SS may face DoS attacks. As the SS plays the important role in Android, serious DoS attacks could cause single-point-of-failure to the phone system. By studying the source code, we discovered a general design trait in the concurrency control mechanism of the SS that could be vulnerable to DoS attacks. To validate our hypothesis, we design a tool to cost efficiently explore high-risk methods in the SS. After a systematic analysis of 2,154 cand...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: CCS
• Authors: Heqing Huang, Sencun Zhu, Kai Chen 0012, Peng Liu 0005
• Keywords: CCS 2015, Security Privacy