International Business Machines Corporation

Petar Tsankov

Omer Tripp

Marco Pistoia

Pietro Ferrara

An apparatus, method and computer program product for repairing security vulnerabilities of an application running on a mobile device. The method comprises: monitoring, by a hardware processor running a mobile device application, an application program interface (API) request associated with a data access operation, the data access operation associated with a security vulnerability. The method determines one or more private values provided by the data access operation and tracks, for each determined private value, a use of the private value by the mobile device application. Further, the method determines from the tracked usage, whether a private value has been transformed in a manner associated with the security vulnerability. For each private value that has been transformed, using the processor to modify the private value deemed a security vulnerability prior to an access by the mobile device application.

Value based information tracking for security enforcement

A computer system performs tracking of security context for confidential or untrusted values input from sources in an executing application to sinks in the executing application. The security context includes indications of sources and declassifier methods corresponding to the values and has been previously defined prior to the tracking. Prior to release of a selected confidential or untrusted value by a sink in the executing application, security context is fetched for the selected confidential or untrusted value. A selected declassifier method is caused to be used on the selected confidential or untrusted value prior to release of the selected confidential or untrusted value to the sink. The selected declassifier method obfuscates the selected confidential or untrusted value and is selected based on the security context for the selected confidential or untrusted value. The obfuscated confidential or untrusted value is caused to be released to the sink in the executing application.

Light-weight context tracking and repair for preventing integrity and confidentiality violations

An improved information tracking procedure is provided. A precise information tracking procedure is performed for a sensitive value when an application is predicted to modify the sensitive value prior to the sensitive value reaching a data sink. The sensitive value comprises an attribute that may be linked to external knowledge to reveal sensitive information about an individual. In response to the application not being predicted to modify the sensitive value prior to the sensitive value reaching the data sink, a value-based information tracking procedure is performed. The value-based information tracking procedure comprises storing one or more values that are observed at a data source, and then determining whether or not each of these one or more values are observed at the data sink.

Providing efficient information tracking with dynamically selected precision

A method is provided to instrument applications with an instrumentation policy that is visually configurable and allows for run-time modifications of the policy. Instrumentation is achieved without modifying the source code of the applications. Modification of the instrumentation policy of an application is applied without re-compiling, re-deploying, and re-provisioning the application. The instrumentation tracks the flow of values at run time throughout the execution of an application and fixes any security violation automatically by dynamically modifying any value that violates integrity or confidentiality.

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Zurich, Switzerland

Petar Tsankov