Android Vulnerabilities: Taxonomy and nextGen Ecosystem

Abstract

Popularity and openness of Android platform has attracted developers and attackers to find the loopholes in the Android based systems for exploitation. Listed Android vulnerabilities are the result of the sincere efforts made by Android users to make the platform robust. In this paper, we try to find the reasons, which causes this vulnerabilities to occur and become exploitable. We characterize the vulnerabilities based on their attributes and map them with specific issues. We have utilized the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) and crawled the CVEs (Common Vulnerability Exposures) specific to Android, from 2008 to 2018. This database helped in deducing and implicating the taxonomy of the Android vulnerabilities. In the end, we also propose a next generation Android ecosystem to protect and deter from the vulnerabilities.