Embroidery: Patching Vulnerable Binary Code of Fragmentized Android Devices

Abstract

The rapid-iteration, web-style update cycle of Android helps fix revealed security vulnerabilities for its latest version. However, such security enhancements are usually only available for few Android devices released by certain manufacturers (e.g., Google’s official Nexus devices). More manufactures choose to stop providing system update service for their obsolete models, remaining millions of vulnerable Android devices in use. In this situation, a feasible solution is to leverage existing source code patches to fix outdated vulnerable devices. To implement this, we introduce EMBROIDERY, a binary rewriting based vulnerability patching system for obsolete Android devices without requiring the manufacturer’s source code against Android fragmentation. EMBROIDERY patches the known critical framework and kernel vulnerabilities in Android using both static and dynamic binary rewriting techniques. It transplants official patches (CVE source code patches) of known vulnerabilities to different devices by adopting heuristic matching strategies to deal with the code diversity introduced by Android fragmentation, and fulfills a complex dynamic memory modification to implement kernel vulnerabilities patching. We employ EMBROIDERY to patch sophisticated Android kernel and framework vulnerabilities for various manufactures’ obsolete devices ranging from Android 4.2 to 5.1. The result shows the patched devices are able to defend against known exploits and the normal functions are not affected.