Android Escalation Paths: Building Attack-Graphs from SEAndroid Policies

Smartphones are a critical device in modern society. With the amount of personal data present on many smartphones, protecting their integrity is crucial. The Android operating system employs multiple layers of security to ensure that the system is resistant to local and remote threats. To achieve this it uses a combination of discretionary and mandatory access control policies. Attackers when attempting to escalate to a higher privilege level must operate within these policies and potentially exploit their flaws. The flow an attacker (and conversely a defender) follows can be modeled as attack graph. In this paper, we explore how attack graphs could be automatically generated from SEAndroid policy files to aid defenders and attackers with auditing system security posture.