Paper

This software is the outcome of our accademic research.

If you use this code, please cite our accademic paper as:

@inproceedings{VPBox,
 author = {Wenna Song and Jiang Ming and Lin Jiang and Yi Xiang and Xuanchen Pan and Jianming Fu and Guojun Peng},
 title = {{Towards Transparent and Stealthy Android OS Sandboxing via Customizable Container-Based Virtualization}},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the 28th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS'21)},
 year = {2021}
}

VPBox (Android 10)

We develop a transparent and stealthy Android OS Sandboxing named VPBox. With VPBox, security analysts can bypass a set of virtual environment detection heuristics. Besides, we demonstrate VPBox’s flexibility in testing environment-sensitive malware that try to evade sandboxes. VPBox’s design is capable of meeting the following two progressive requirements:

RQ1: Transparency. This requirement involves the virtualized device exhibits the same hardware effects as the underlying physical device; and complete virtualization support for all devices and services listed in this paper.
RQ2: Stealthiness. On top of the transparency, this requirement ensures a dedicated adversary in the VP is difficult to fingerprint the presence of the container, including the presence of virtualization components and the particular mobile device that runs the container.

VPBox reveals a strong resilience against virtual-machine detection heuristics and device-consistency checks, as well as native performance. VPBox’s demo video is available at https://youtu.be/TpGD_jjxSqc.

Overview of VPBox's Virtualization Architecture

The figure provides an overview of VPBox’s device virtualization. Each isolated VP runs a stock Android userspace environment. The names in red in figure represent Cells’s modules reused by VPBox. VPBox updates the other modules. For updated code implementation, please see the section of the code introduction below.

Code Introduction

cells

cells/: VP manager daemons
cellsservice/: VP manager
cellsapp/: switch applications
busybox/: Linux tools

system

core/adb/: adb mutex virtualization
core/init/: VP startup
core/rootdir/init.cells.rc: VP's init.rc
core/rootdir/cells/: additional configuration files for the VP
core/sdcard/: sdcard virtualization

kernel

drivers/base/core.c: drv namespace initialization
kernel/drv_namespace.c: drv namespace api
kernel/nsproxy.c: namespaces proxy
drivers/android/binder.c: binder virtualization
drivers/input/evdev.c: input virtualization
kernel/power/wakelock.c: wakelock virtualization

frameworks

av/: camera audio video media virtualization
native/libs/binder/: binder virtualization
native/services/surfaceflinger/: display virtualization
base/services/core/java/com/android/server/CellsService.java: net virtualization
base/core/java/android/app/CellsPrivateServiceManager.java: cellsservice java service

android-binder

binder virtualization of the android operating system

configuration file

share-services: compile system configuration file
kernel-modify-config： kernel config modify file
build.VPDroid.prop build.VPDroid.cell2.prop build.VPDroid.cell3.prop: custom configuration file for update customized environment

other modify

aufs and ksm modify see commit log

basic code

The Android source code is: android-10.0.0_r33
The ways to download source code: https://source.android.com/setup/develop/repo

System Prerequisites

Operating System: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
JDK version：openJDK version 9

Compile Command

source build/envsetup.sh

lunch 4

make -j4

Benchmarks and Samples

Benchmarks

Linpack (v1.1) for CPU;
Quadrant advanced edition (v2.1.1) for 2D graphics and file I/O;
3DMark (v2.0.4646) for 3D graphics;
BusyBox wget (v1.21.1) for networking.
GPS Test app (v1.6.3) for GPS.
Bluetooth Setting for Bluetooth.

Samples

We have used nine families of malware to evaluate virtualization environment detection.

forkcc / VPBox