Quire: Lightweight Provenance for Smart Phone Operating Systems

TL;DR

Quire enhances smartphone OS security by implementing provenance tracking and lightweight signatures, enabling better trust and validation of network connections and inter-app communications within Android.

Contribution

It introduces two novel security mechanisms into Android: call chain tracking of IPCs and a lightweight signature scheme for app assertions.

Findings

Enabled remote systems to verify phone state during RPCs

Prevented forgery of payment requests by apps

Validated clicks and payment requests effectively

Abstract

Smartphone apps often run with full privileges to access the network and sensitive local resources, making it difficult for remote systems to have any trust in the provenance of network connections they receive. Even within the phone, different apps with different privileges can communicate with one another, allowing one app to trick another into improperly exercising its privileges (a Confused Deputy attack). In Quire, we engineered two new security mechanisms into Android to address these issues. First, we track the call chain of IPCs, allowing an app the choice of operating with the diminished privileges of its callers or to act explicitly on its own behalf. Second, a lightweight signature scheme allows any app to create a signed statement that can be verified anywhere inside the phone. Both of these mechanisms are reflected in network RPCs, allowing remote systems visibility into the state of the phone when an RPC is made. We demonstrate the usefulness of Quire with two example applications. We built an advertising service, running distinctly from the app which wants to display ads, which can validate clicks passed to it from its host. We also built a payment service, allowing an app to issue a request which the payment service validates with the user. An app cannot not forge a payment request by directly connecting to the remote server, nor can the local payment service tamper with the request.