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A code protection scheme by process memory relocation for android devices

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Abstract

Android devices is emerging as a significant force for multimedia big data, which hold an enormous amount of information about the users. The security and privacy concerns have arisen as a salient area of inquiry since malicious attackers can use memory dump to extract privacy or sensitive data from these devices. This paper presents a code protection approach for Android devices which protects certain processes from memory acquisition by process memory relocation. The protected processes are relocated to the special memory area where the kernel is loaded, and thus these processes will be covered when android reboots and attackers can not recognize which protected programs have been performed on the devices. The experiment results show that the proposed approach disables forensics tools like FROST to obtain these processes and has little impact on the normal operation of the protected program. Compared with the similar methods, the proposed method can protect greater data quantity but it occupies no additional storage resources.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.U1636213), Beijing Municipal Natural Science Foundation (No.4172053).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081, China

    Xiaosong Zhang, Yu-an Tan, Yuan Xue, Yuanzhang Li & Jun Zheng

  2. Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tangshan University, Tangshan, 063000, China

    Xiaosong Zhang

  3. Research Center of Massive Language Information Processing and Cloud Computing Application, Beijing, 100081, China

    Yu-an Tan & Jun Zheng

  4. Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing, 100190, China

    Changyou Zhang

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  1. Xiaosong Zhang
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  2. Yu-an Tan
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  3. Changyou Zhang
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  4. Yuan Xue
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  5. Yuanzhang Li
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  6. Jun Zheng
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Correspondence to Jun Zheng.

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Zhang, X., Tan, Ya., Zhang, C. et al. A code protection scheme by process memory relocation for android devices. Multimed Tools Appl 77, 11137–11157 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-017-5363-9

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