Let's make something big (using Cydia)

Modification to the Android operating system’s resource control

Android, an operating system based on the Linux kernel, has millions of users around the world. Its security scheme to protect a user from abusive applications is all or nothing. When a user wants to install an application, she must accept every permission it’s requiring as a whole, without the chance to change them once they were granted.

For lack of a better implementation, we developed an application that allows a more granular access control to the resources we consider of main importance from the user’s privacy and security point of view.

When an application asks to access a resource, our approach allows the user not just to retrieve false or anonymous information, but to select a subset of the real data, so she can keep on using the applications in a controlled manner. This way, a user can defend herself from a possible abuse of trust that some applications may attempt. The Android security architecture doesn’t address this kind of trust problems. In other related works where the user can only retrieve fake data, access control affects the usability when controlling a key resource for the application. For example, the user clearly did not intend using WhatsApp with an empty contacts list.

In this project, we've accomplished control access to contacts, data that allows a device and its owner to be unambiguously identified such as its id, subscriber id, sim card and phone number, device’s network information such as its IP, MAC, the SSID and BSSID of the access point it is connected to, the configured and scanned networks and, finally, we control every way an application can know the device’s location, not only using the gps but also the cell towers and configured wireless networks.

Feel free to use, share and learn from it's source code. We call it ASA (Android Security Agency).

GitHub link: https://github.com/c0d1ngb4d/ASA