An Empirical Study on Android for Saving Non-shared Data on Public Storage
Xiangyu Liu, Zhe Zhou, Wenrui Diao, Zhou Li, Kehuan Zhang

TL;DR
This paper empirically investigates Android's storage model for non-sensitive, non-shared data, revealing significant information leaks and proposing a defense framework to address these vulnerabilities.
Contribution
It provides a thorough survey of information leaks caused by Android's current storage model and introduces a new defense framework to mitigate these security issues.
Findings
Billions of users' sensitive info can be hacked due to storage flaws
Android's recommended storage model is inherently vulnerable
Proposed defense framework improves data security
Abstract
With millions of apps that can be downloaded from official or third-party market, Android has become one of the most popular mobile platforms today. These apps help people in all kinds of ways and thus have access to lots of user's data that in general fall into three categories: sensitive data, data to be shared with other apps, and non-sensitive data not to be shared with others. For the first and second type of data, Android has provided very good storage models: an app's private sensitive data are saved to its private folder that can only be access by the app itself, and the data to be shared are saved to public storage (either the external SD card or the emulated SD card area on internal FLASH memory). But for the last type, i.e., an app's non-sensitive and non-shared data, there is a big problem in Android's current storage model which essentially encourages an app to save its…
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Taxonomy
TopicsAdvanced Malware Detection Techniques · Digital and Cyber Forensics · Security and Verification in Computing
