Privacy Sensitive Resource Access Monitoring for Android Systems

Existing works have studied how to collect and analyze human usage of mobile devices, to aid in further understanding of human behavior. Typical data collection utilizes applications or background services installed on the mobile device with user permission to collect user usage data via accelerometer, call logs, location, Wi-Fi transmission, etc. through a data tainting process. Built on the existing work, this research developed a system called Panorama (Privacy-sensitive Resource Access Monitoring for Android Systems) to collect application behavior instead of user behavior. The goal is to provide the means to analyze how background services access mobile resources, and potentially to identify suspicious applications that access sensitive user information. Panorama tracks the access of mobile resources in real time and enhances the concept of taint tracking. Each identified user privacy-sensitive resource is tagged and marked for tracking. The result is a dynamic, real-time tool that monitors the process flow of applications. This paper presents the development of Panorama and a set of analysis with respect to a variety of legitimate application behaviors.