Introducing probabilities in contract-based approaches for mobile application security

Security for mobile devices is a problem of capital importance, especially due to new threats coming from malicious applications. Though several security solutions have already been proposed, security requirements have been always considered as binary: allow or deny. We argue that a more realistic vision of security can be given using probabilistic and quantitative requirements. In this paper, we introduce a probabilistic description of the behavior of an application that a user is going to execute.We also allow the definition of finer grained user security requirements, by introducing probabilistic clause modifiers. Later, we present a probabilistic version of the Security-by-Contract and the Security by-Contract-with-Trust frameworks to guarantee probabilistic security requirements.