The App Defense Alliance (ADA), an industry-leading collaboration launched by Google in 2019 dedicated to ensuring the safety of the app ecosystem, is taking a major step forward. We are proud to announce that the App Defense Alliance is moving under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation, with Meta, Microsoft, and Google as founding steering members.
This strategic migration represents a pivotal moment in the Alliance’s journey, signifying a shared commitment by the members to strengthen app security and related standards across ecosystems. This evolution of the App Defense Alliance will enable us to foster more collaborative implementation of industry standards for app security.
Uniting for App Security
The digital landscape is continually evolving, and so are the threats to user security. With the ever-increasing complexity of mobile apps and the growing importance of data protection, now is the perfect time for this transition. The Linux Foundation is renowned for its dedication to fostering open-source projects that drive innovation, security, and sustainability. By combining forces with additional members under the Linux Foundation, we can adapt and respond more effectively to emerging challenges.
The commitment of the newly structured App Defense Alliance’s founding steering members – Meta, Microsoft, and Google – is pivotal in making this transition a reality. With a member community spanning an additional 16 General and Contributor Members, the Alliance will support industry-wide adoption of app security best practices and guidelines, as well as countermeasures against emerging security risks.
Continuing the Malware Mitigation Program
The App Defense Alliance was formed with the mission of reducing the risk of app-based malware and better protecting Android users. Malware defense remains an important focus for Google and Android, and we will continue to partner closely with the Malware Mitigation Program members – ESET, Lookout, McAfee, Trend Micro, Zimperium – on direct signal sharing. The migration of ADA under the Linux Foundation will enable broader threat intelligence sharing across leading ecosystem partners and researchers.
Looking Ahead and Connecting With the ADA
We invite you to stay connected with the newly structured App Defense Alliance under the Linux foundation umbrella. Join the conversation to help make apps more secure. Together with the steering committee, alliance partners, and the broader ecosystem, we look forward to building more secure and trustworthy app ecosystems.
The App Defense Alliance launched in 2019 with a mission to protect Android users from bad apps through shared intelligence and coordinated detection between alliance partners. Earlier this year, the App Defense Alliance expanded to include new initiatives outside of malware detection and is now the home for several industry-led collaborations including Malware Mitigation, MASA (Mobile App Security Assessment) & CASA (Cloud App Security Assessment). With a new dedicated landing page at appdefensealliance.dev, the ADA has an expanded mission to protect Android users by removing threats while improving app quality across the ecosystem. Let’s walk through some of the latest program updates from the past year, including the addition of new ADA members.
Malware Mitigation
Together, with the founding ADA members - Google, ESET, Lookout, and Zimperium, the alliance has been able to reduce the risk of app-based malware and better protect Android users. These partners have access to mobile apps as they are being submitted to the Google Play Store and scan thousands of apps daily, acting as another, vital set of eyes prior to an app going live on Play. Knowledge sharing and industry collaboration are important aspects in securing the world from attacks and that’s why we’re continuing to invest in the program.
New ADA Members
We’re excited to see the ADA expand with the additions of McAfee and Trend Micro. Both McAfee and Trend Micro are leaders in the antivirus space and we look forward to their contributions to the program.
Mobile App Security Assessment (MASA)
With consumers spending four to five hours per day in mobile apps, ensuring the safety of these services is more important than ever. According to Data.ai, the pandemic accelerated existing mobile habits - with app categories like finance growing 25% YoY and users spending over 100 billion hours in shopping apps.
That’s why the ADA introduced MASA (Mobile App Security Assessment), which allows developers to have their apps independently validated against the Mobile Application Security Verification Standard (MASVS standard) under the OWASP Mobile Application Security project. The project’s mission is to “Define the industry standard for mobile application security,” and has been used by both public and private sector organizations as a form of industry best practices when it comes to mobile application security. Developers can work directly with an ADA Authorized Lab to have their apps evaluated against a set of MASVS L1 requirements. Once successful, the app’s validation is listed in the recently launched App Validation Directory, which provides users a single place to view all app validations. The Directory also allows users to access more assessment details including validation date, test lab, and a report showing all test steps and requirements. The Directory will be updated over time with new features and search functionality to make it more user friendly.
The Google Play Store is the first commercial app store to recognize and display a badge for any app that has completed an independent security review through ADA MASA. The badge is displayed within an app’s respective Data Safety section.
To learn more about the program and to help developers get started, there’s a Play Academy course dedicated to independent security review. Check out the interactive guidance on the Academy for App Success and get started today!
Cloud App Security Assessment (CASA)
As the industry continues to evolve and software connects more systems through complex cloud-to-cloud integrations, focusing on the security of cloud applications and their supporting infrastructure becomes increasingly critical. CASA (Cloud App Security Assessment) leverages the work set forth in OWASP’s Application Security Verification Standard ASVS to provide a consistent set of requirements to harden security for any application. The CASA framework provides multiple assurance levels in which low-risk cloud applications can be evaluated using either a self assessment or automated scan. For applications which present higher risk (such as a large user base, recent security breach, or processes highly sensitive data), an Authorized Lab may perform an assessment.
Further, the CASA accelerator provides developers with a workflow that minimizes the required checks depending on the developer's current valid certifications. The CASA checks have been mapped to 10 certifications and frameworks which eliminate redundant testing while lowering the cost of the assessment. Google is continuing to invest in this space with plans to use ASVS more proactively with the developer community next year.
It's been amazing to see the ADA grow this year and we are excited for the continued progress and expansion around the alliance’s mission.
Integrating security into your app development lifecycle can save a lot of time, money, and risk. That’s why we’ve launched Security by Design on Google Play Academy to help developers identify, mitigate, and proactively protect against security threats.
The Android ecosystem, including Google Play, has many built-in security features that help protect developers and users. The course Introduction to app security best practices takes these protections one step further by helping you take advantage of additional security features to build into your app. For example, Jetpack Security helps developers properly encrypt their data at rest and provides only safe and well known algorithms for encrypting Files and SharedPreferences. The SafetyNet Attestation API is a solution to help identify potentially dangerous patterns in usage. There are several common design vulnerabilities that are important to look out for, including using shared or improper file storage, using insecure protocols, unprotected components such as Activities, and more. The course also provides methods to test your app in order to help you keep it safe after launch. Finally, you can set up a Vulnerability Disclosure Program (VDP) to engage security researchers to help.
In the next course, you can learn how to integrate security at every stage of the development process by adopting the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL). The SDL is an industry standard process and in this course you’ll learn the fundamentals of setting up a program, getting executive sponsorship and integration into your development lifecycle.
Threat modeling is part of the Security Development Lifecycle, and in this course you will learn to think like an attacker to identify, categorize, and address threats. By doing so early in the design phase of development, you can identify potential threats and start planning for how to mitigate them at a much lower cost and create a more secure product for your users.
Improving your app’s security is a never ending process. Sign up for the Security by Design module where in a few short courses, you will learn how to integrate security into your app development lifecycle, model potential threats, and app security best practices into your app, as well as avoid potential design pitfalls.
Google’s Android Security & Privacy team has launched the Android Partner Vulnerability Initiative (APVI) to manage security issues specific to Android OEMs. The APVI is designed to drive remediation and provide transparency to users about issues we have discovered at Google that affect device models shipped by Android partners.
Android incorporates industry-leading security features and every day we work with developers and device implementers to keep the Android platform and ecosystem safe. As part of that effort, we have a range of existing programs to enable security researchers to report security issues they have found. For example, you can report vulnerabilities in Android code via the Android Security Rewards Program (ASR), and vulnerabilities in popular third-party Android apps through the Google Play Security Rewards Program. Google releases ASR reports in Android Open Source Project (AOSP) based code through the Android Security Bulletins (ASB). These reports are issues that could impact all Android based devices. All Android partners must adopt ASB changes in order to declare the current month’s Android security patch level (SPL). But until recently, we didn’t have a clear way to process Google-discovered security issues outside of AOSP code that are unique to a much smaller set of specific Android OEMs. The APVI aims to close this gap, adding another layer of security for this targeted set of Android OEMs.
The APVI covers Google-discovered issues that could potentially affect the security posture of an Android device or its user and is aligned to ISO/IEC 29147:2018 Information technology -- Security techniques -- Vulnerability disclosure recommendations. The initiative covers a wide range of issues impacting device code that is not serviced or maintained by Google (these are handled by the Android Security Bulletins).
The APVI has already processed a number of security issues, improving user protection against permissions bypasses, execution of code in the kernel, credential leaks and generation of unencrypted backups. Below are a few examples of what we’ve found, the impact and OEM remediation efforts.
In some versions of a third-party pre-installed over-the-air (OTA) update solution, a custom system service in the Android framework exposed privileged APIs directly to the OTA app. The service ran as the system user and did not require any permissions to access, instead checking for knowledge of a hardcoded password. The operations available varied across versions, but always allowed access to sensitive APIs, such as silently installing/uninstalling APKs, enabling/disabling apps and granting app permissions. This service appeared in the code base for many device builds across many OEMs, however it wasn’t always registered or exposed to apps. We’ve worked with impacted OEMs to make them aware of this security issue and provided guidance on how to remove or disable the affected code.
A popular web browser pre-installed on many devices included a built-in password manager for sites visited by the user. The interface for this feature was exposed to WebView through JavaScript loaded in the context of each web page. A malicious site could have accessed the full contents of the user’s credential store. The credentials are encrypted at rest, but used a weak algorithm (DES) and a known, hardcoded key. This issue was reported to the developer and updates for the app were issued to users.
The checkUidPermission method in the PackageManagerService class was modified in the framework code for some devices to allow special permissions access to some apps. In one version, the method granted apps with the shared user ID com.google.uid.shared any permission they requested and apps signed with the same key as the com.google.android.gsf package any permission in their manifest. Another version of the modification allowed apps matching a list of package names and signatures to pass runtime permission checks even if the permission was not in their manifest. These issues have been fixed by the OEMs.
checkUidPermission
PackageManagerService
com.google.uid.shared
com.google.android.gsf
Keep an eye out at https://bugs.chromium.org/p/apvi/ for future disclosures of Google-discovered security issues under this program, or find more information there on issues that have already been disclosed.
Acknowledgements: Scott Roberts, Shailesh Saini and Łukasz Siewierski, Android Security and Privacy Team
Follow