Timeline :

Before Nov 2nd 2e013 – Install CM and decide the milestone proposal

Followed the steps in Installing CyanogenMod to install CM ( version of CM cm-10.2-20131030-nightly-targa ) into the device. To gain root access we used this link.

Nov. 3 – Nov. 9   :  Understand how source code works in Privacy Guard and analysis Apps behavior

Access  the source code to Cyanogenmod through github.  Review the code to understand how the Privacy Guard app works . As a result, prepare a complete analysis of the flow of the code along with list of functionality available by the App.

Nov.10 – Nov.23 :  Code for an App to generate report

Learn the basics of android App development . Develop an App that can be run on a device to produce a log Report on the various permission access requests from the apps running on the device and prepare a report based on the privacy violations . The App will be based on the concept similar to LogCollector .

Nov.24 – Nov.30 : Make the code dynamic for more apps

Dec. 2-6 : Presentation

After presentation and before Dec. 18, Documentation and Report

Prepare a detailed user manual of how the App works along with features available . Documentation of the code. Write a paper based on the results and Analysis accomplished .

We started by trying to install CM .

These are the steps we followed were

1. Installed eclipse

2. Installed Android SDK and AVD

3. Then as per

a. link1

b. link2

Problem : It just hung up and did not proceed.

Problem : We couldn’t find the following options

1. Go to Available Packages

2. Click on Add Add-on website to add the site

c. link3

Problem : There was no target option available , So we couldn’t finish creating a

new device to add on the AVD

——————————Solution we came up with —————————————–

We Bought Motorola Droid Bionic (“targa”) and implemented the steps described in this page.

Steps:

1.Prepare the Build Environment

2.Install the SDK

3.Install the Build Packages

4.Create the directories

5.Install the repo command

6.Put the ~/bin directory in your path of execution

7.Initialize the CyanogenMod source repository

8.Download the source code

9.Get prebuilt apps

We encountered problems on transferring the source code to the mobile device. We could

successfully download it to the virtual machine(ubuntu).

Welcome to Fall2013 Main Project

Resource

Research Proposal

General Idea on Cyanogenmod

Details on Cyanogenmod

How to install Eclipse in Ubuntu 13.04

Android Device Emulator

—— Feel free to add any more resource here if you find it useful for our project. Appreciate it in advance! ———–

         COMP527 Final Project Proposal

          By Cen Chen, Yijie Li,  Nithya Renganathan

Problem Description

Mobile security is becoming an increasingly concerned issue every day as more mobile apps are available. Certain mobile apps can – on purpose – access to people’s personal information, like contacts list, current location. Facebook, for instance, would never accidentally share your contacts list with the world.

There are high potential threats for Android users as Android is a flexible layout framework allowing everyone to position elements relative to each other for free. App developers tend to choose this platform and we have no idea what their apps do in backend.

So CyanogenMod emerges, shedding light on what apps do in backend and making Android users  manage their personal information on their device.

CyanogenMod is an open source firmware distribution for smart and tablet based on Android system.[1]

Recently, CyanogenMod has a new feature called Privacy Guard. This feature gives users better controls over apps and their permissions. In fact, Privacy Guard allows users to manage apps access permissions in the system. Now Privacy Guard moves forwards to 2.0 version, and CM is integrating something called “AppOps”: When permissions are denied for an app, AppOps gives the system the ability to revoke permissions and return empty data sets.[2]

Project Description

This project is to add a feature to Privacy Guard in CyanogenMod so that it can perform reports with privacy-related issues of installed apps to users,  like recording the frequency of an app accessing to personal info, or what kinds of personal info.

Expected Features of this project include:

1. Check privacy-related behaviors of installed apps

2. Reports in pretty visual format on mobile phone

3. Scalable to adapt to different apps

4. Scalable to be developed on different devices, computer, phone e.g.

5. Pretty reports on different devices

Features are listed in priority order. We haven’t fully insight current features of Privacy Guard for now, so we may modify the specific features we intend to work on. But whatever the feature is, this priority order stays the same.

High-Level Overview of Approach

With the priority list, this project is expected to be developed in following steps:

• Install CyanogenMod; Be familiar with CyanogenMod and Privacy Guard

• Understand the source code of Privacy Guard: How Privacy Guard interacts with apps

• Take several installed apps on CyanogenMod as example, analysis their privacy-related behavior

• Write code to perform the new feature based on one app

• Get reports in pretty visual format

• Expand the project to adapt to more apps and evaluate the reports

• Make the project dynamic to be applied on different devices

• Pretty reports on all devices

• Documentation

Potential Outcomes

With this implementation, Android users can manage their personal info and use apps in a reasonable way. They can clearly see how often apps access to the privacy info and what kind of info are attacked though the attack may be denies by other features of Privacy Guard. According to the reports, they can choose to use or drop certain apps.

Reference:

[1] “CyanogenMod | Android Community Rom Based on Jelly Bean.” CyanogenMod. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Oct. 2013.

[2] “CyanogenMod Updating to Privacy Guard 2.0 with New Features, Coming to CM 10.2.” Android Central. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Oct. 2013.