Privilege Escalation Detecting in Android Applications

Abstract

As the most popular mobile operating system, there are large amount of applications developed for Android. Considering security issues, developers are forced to declare relative permissions in manifest file when they need to use sensitive APIs. With the ability of inter-component communication (ICC) provided by Android, malicious applications can indirectly call sensitive APIs through components exposed by other applications, leading to privilege escalation. To address this problem, we propose a method to detect this kind of privilege escalation between two applications. First, we compare the permission sets of both applications. Then, if necessary we identify call links between two applications and perform inter-application control flow analysis. Finally, according to the result of control flow analysis, we can judge whether the privilege escalation exists. As the experiment result shows, our method can accurately detect privilege escalation between two applications.