Operating System Security: Research Report for COC Module Project

This research report provides an overview of operating system security, focusing on the Android operating system. It discusses Android's open-source nature and its implications for security, including vulnerabilities and potential attacks. The report reviews various security features and mechanisms implemented in Android, such as application sandboxing and permission management. It also highlights the challenges and issues related to Android security, including the ineffectiveness of antivirus software and the increasing malicious attacks targeting banking sectors. Furthermore, the report delves into specific vulnerabilities in different layers of the Android architecture, such as the Linux Kernel Layer and Framework Layer, and discusses security enhancements introduced in various Android versions. The report concludes by emphasizing the importance of protecting user data and system resources in Android and points to Desklib as a resource for students seeking similar assignments and study tools.

Running head: OPERATING SYSTEM SECURITY
Operating System Security
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note:

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Table of Contents
Introduction..........................................................................................................................2
Literature review..................................................................................................................2
Conclusion...........................................................................................................................6
References............................................................................................................................7

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Introduction
Google Android is a Linux based operating device which is used in range of mobile
devices like smartphones and computers. Android is an open source operating system due to
which it has become as one of the fastest growing operating systems (Silberschatz, Gagne and
Galvin 2018). As a result of openness property, it has become the most favorite brand among
both consumers and developers (Canfora et al. 2015). Software developers can easily make
changes and improve the features so that they can meet the latest requirement of mobile
technology. Android users can easily download more than 1.5 billion application and games
from Google store every month (Ranganath et al. 2015). As a result of powerful framework, both
users and developers can create own application for wide range of devices. Android operating
system comes up with some unique features like media support, Bluetooth, GPS, SQLite, and
many other features.
In the coming pages, a literature review has been conducted security technologies of
android mobile. After that, a discussion has been provided with respect to threats, attacks in
mobile operating system. Various issues with respect to configuration or installation of google
android have been discussed in details. The last section of the report deals with vulnerabilities
and social issues with respect to Android operating system.
Literature review
According to (Shaw et al. 2016), Android-based application runs in operating system
which does not provide any kind of access to rest of system based resources. In some cases, it
can provide access to user that is when applications are installed in it (Arshad et al. 2018). Prior
to installation, Play store asks for all required information. For example, a game may require to

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have permission for vibration but it should not provide an idea with respect to access to message
or even access to phonebook. After analyzing the given permission, the user can decide whether
they can install the application or not. Both sandboxing and required permission to system can
weaken the effect of vulnerabilities and any kind of bug in the application. In many cases,
developer’s confusion and limitation documentation which has resulted in running of limited
documentation which reduces overall effectiveness. There is a complexity of inter-application
communication which focuses on the fact that Android has a large surface area. Various security
firms have come up with antivirus software more specifically AVG technologies, F-secure and
McAfee. These android applications are also ineffective as sandboxing is applied to this
application which will limit their ability to scan the system deeper for threats.
As per (Alan and Kaur 2016), there has been increase in malicious attacks in various
banking sectors like malicious malware. It mainly takes account of auto vulnerabilities that are
installed in the Android Platform. It has victimized a large number of Google Play users by
impersonating application for video players, system utilities and flash player. Apart from this,
there was incident of mobile banking Trojans delivered as a fake update. It is mainly targeted
through email or even phishing. Among all the given, the most sophisticated one is Android
malware that takes the function of Android. It aims to add up ransomware capabilities which are
seen in most of the malicious activities. The malware has been designed in such a way that it can
encrypt files and locks up devices (Lee et al. 2016). It mainly sends notification for tricking users
so that they can open an online banking application.

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5OPERATING SYSTEM SECURITY
As stated by (Dimjašević et al. 2016), Android operating system comes up with built-in
security features like application sandboxing. It is mainly done so that they can provide
protecting buffer and integer overflow attacks. User needs to make use of internal storage for
sensitive data. Various android application comes up with internal directory whose package is
available on the application. Filename inside the given directory is considered to be secure
because file creation is set by default mode. It merely focuses on the fact that file cannot be
accessed by any other application on the devices. As data on the external device can be directly
accessed by both users and other application on the devices. It is very much vital to store the
devices in encrypted form. One of the biggest algorithm used by developers is advanced
encryption standard (AES) that has a key size of 256 bits.
According to (Yuan, Lu and Xue 2016), Google has understood six remote code
execution flaws in android operating system which is a part of Android security. Four of the
given flaws are attached to Android media framework which can impact a wide number of
Android devices like Google pixel, Nexus phones. The biggest issue in the vulnerability is that
remote attack by making use of arbitrary codes in the privileged method. In the last few years,
Google has reported around 26 vulnerabilities of which eight are critical, seventeen are highly
rated and only one is moderate one. Vulnerabilities are mainly tied to Android operating system
execution environment. The main secure area is the main processor. It mainly assures that both
code and data can be loaded which respect to protected data with respect to confidentiality and
integrity.
According to (Dinesh et al. 2015), there are mainly six categories of Android
vulnerabilities like Linux Kernel Layer, Libraries Layer, Framework Layer, and lastly external
drive. The classification has been made as a result of identifying weak areas of implementation

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of Android. Vulnerabilities in the application framework layer result in DoS, execution of code
and authentication of access. A flaw in the service of Bluetooth may result in compromised with
data of the user, that is sensitive in nature. Any kind of exploit in the application layer can occur
by the help of browser where attacker executes a list of binary codes. In this attack, the attackers
are given unauthenticated access to some of protected resources. It is inclusive of vulnerability in
the Pisca application where username and passwords are provided in clear text. It is mainly done
at the time of transmission of authToken that is gained after client login. There is huge number of
flaws in the implementation of external drivers named as PowerVR and Qualcomm that have
vulnerabilities. Any kind of vulnerabilities in the layer of high CVSS score can have huge
amount of impact. ZergRush exploit that is done by the help of stack buffer overflow can be
obtained by code execution. It is obtained by passing incorrect number of arguments in the given
API. The exploit of Ginger Break is caused by the help of some of the well-known malware
where individual can get the root of the devices. The latest attack allowed an individual to make
changes in the malicious content without any kind of modification in the signature. This
particular vulnerability is known as Master Key Vulnerability. Wrong permission which is set by
individual can allow the Zygote to send any kind of application to any fork request without any
kind any of verification of the identity.
The main notion for implementing Android security is all about protection of user data
and system based resources (Silberschatz, Gagne and Galvin 2018). It provides an isolation of
the given application. Android has updated its security controls with each and every patch and
version that is released. Earlier version of android does not have any kind of feature to protect
the devices from malicious attack (Arshad et al. 2018). Android cupcake comes up with two
kinds of security feature named as pro police and safe_iop for preventing overflow of buffer. The

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main notion of ProPolice is all about preventing overrun of stack buffer while the task of
safe_iop is preventing overflow of integer(Irwansyah et al. 2018). Android 2.3 is completely
based on No eXecute. So if anyhow some of the application have the ability to carry out buffer
overflow and put execution code on stack, the exploit will not take place due to this particular
protection (Dimjašević et al. 2016). Android 4.0 is known to be first version for implementing
ASLR. This can be done for randomizes of heap of allocated memory (Ranganath et al. 2015). In
each of the given time memory allocation is completely done for the given module or process.
Conclusion
The above pages of the report help us to reach a point that Android is one of the most
popular operating systems to date. It is mainly used as an operating system in Smartphone and
portable gadgets. Two of its unique properties that are programmable and open nature attracts
hackers to undue the advantages. The platform of Android is helpful as it allows attackers to
freely access and makes modification in the given source code. Linux Kernel is known to be
basic layer that lies between hardware layer and software layer. Android operating system is
completely built on the top part of Linux kernel with certain number of changes in architecture
done by Google. The kernel comes up with huge number of device drivers which makes the
interface to different devices in an easy way. The kernel aims to provide some of the basic
system based functionality like process management, memory management and lastly device
management.

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References
Alan, H.F. and Kaur, J., 2016, July. Can Android applications be identified using only TCP/IP
headers of their launch time traffic?. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM conference on security &
privacy in wireless and mobile networks (pp. 61-66). ACM.
Arshad, S., Shah, M.A., Wahid, A., Mehmood, A., Song, H. and Yu, H., 2018. SAMADroid: a
novel 3-level hybrid malware detection model for android operating system. IEEE Access, 6,
pp.4321-4339.
Canfora, G., Medvet, E., Mercaldo, F. and Visaggio, C.A., 2015, August. Detecting android
malware using sequences of system calls. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on
Software Development Lifecycle for Mobile (pp. 13-20). ACM.
Dimjašević, M., Atzeni, S., Ugrina, I. and Rakamaric, Z., 2016, March. Evaluation of android
malware detection based on system calls. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM on International
Workshop on Security And Privacy Analytics (pp. 1-8). ACM.
Dinesh, R., Pravin, S.A., Aravindhan, M. and Rajeswari, D., 2015. Library access system
smartphone application using Android. International Journal of Computer Science and Mobile
Computing, 4(3), pp.142-149.
Heuser, S., Negro, M., Pendyala, P.K. and Sadeghi, A.R., 2016, February. DroidAuditor:
Forensic Analysis of Application-Layer Privilege Escalation Attacks on Android (Short Paper).
In International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security (pp. 260-268).
Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

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Irwansyah, F.S., Yusuf, Y.M., Farida, I. and Ramdhani, M.A., 2018, January. Augmented reality
(AR) technology on the android operating system in chemistry learning. In IOP Conference
Series: Materials Science and Engineering (Vol. 288, No. 1, p. 012068). IOP Publishing.
Lee, C.W., Licorish, S.A., Savarimuthu, B.T.R. and MacDonell, S.G., 2016, January.
Augmenting text mining approaches with social network analysis to understand the complex
relationships among users' requests: A case study of the android operating system. In 2016 49th
Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) (pp. 1144-1153). IEEE.
Ranganath, S., Thiagarajan, J.J., Ramamurthy, K.N., Hu, S., Banavar, M. and Spanias, A., 2015.
Undergraduate signal processing laboratories for the android operating system. arXiv preprint
arXiv:1502.07026.
Shaw, H., Ellis, D.A., Kendrick, L.R., Ziegler, F. and Wiseman, R., 2016. Predicting smartphone
operating system from personality and individual differences. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and
Social Networking, 19(12), pp.727-732.
Silberschatz, A., Gagne, G. and Galvin, P.B., 2018. Operating system concepts. Wiley.
Yuan, Z., Lu, Y. and Xue, Y., 2016. Droiddetector: android malware characterization and
detection using deep learning. Tsinghua Science and Technology, 21(1), pp.114-123.