System and method for app certification
View Patent ↗A system and method for a web-based portal for certification of an application software (App). A draft App is created and submitted, by an App developer, to the web-based portal where a mediate administrator reviews, approves, or rejects the draft App based on a set of targets set by an App provider. The mediate administrator communicates rejection of the draft App to the developer. The mediate administrator communicates approval of the draft App to the developer and to one or more providers. The one or more providers perform their own review of the App and may modify the approved App with further target attributes. An approved App is published by the developer. An approved and/or modified approved App may be offered to a user by way of an in-vehicle infotainment system.
1 . A computer-implemented method for certification of an application software (App) for deployment in a vehicle computing environment, the method comprising the steps of:
granting, through a web-based portal managed by a mediate administrator, secure access to a developer and one or more providers, each of which communicates with the web-based portal through a network interface;
receiving, at the web-based portal, a draft App created by the developer;
executing, by the web-based portal, a certification process comprising automated quality-assurance and validation testing of the draft App against vehicle-specific targeting attributes provided by the one or more providers and generating an automotive grade score computed as an average of privacy, performance, distraction, security, and maliciousness category scores;
performing, by a validation engine of the web-based portal, a plurality of analyses comprising:
performing a static analysis of decompiled code and native libraries of the App to identify permission requests and potential malicious behavior;
performing a dynamic analysis of hooks, data logs, and resource usage of the App within a virtual device simulation of the vehicle computing environment;
performing an external analysis that performs malicious-link scanning and open-source license and vulnerability checks;
aggregating, by the web-based portal, results of the quality-assurance and validation testing and generating either a certification report or a testing failure report;
transmitting, within the web-based portal, the certification report to the developer and to the one or more providers;
transmitting, within the web-based portal, the testing failure report to the developer;
receiving, at the web-based portal an approval indication from at least one of the providers;
automatically signing the approved draft App within the web-based portal to indicate the App as certified for deployment in the vehicle computing environment; and
publishing, by the web-based portal, the certified App to an application repository that is accessible from within the vehicle computing environment.
2 . The computer-implemented method as claimed in 1 , wherein the step of automatically signing the approved draft App further comprises the one or more providers, at the web-based portal, performing the step of modifying the draft App by applying, through the web-based portal, provider-defined restrictions to the approved draft App prior to the step of signing the approved draft App.
3 . The computer-implemented method as claimed in claim 1 , wherein the step of transmitting the certification report further comprises transmitting the certification to the developer and to the one or more providers simultaneously.