Android Inter-Component Communication Research Articles

Secure and flexible message-based communication for mobile apps within and across devices

In modern mobile platforms, message-based communication is afflicted by data leakage attacks, through which untrustworthy apps access the transferred message data. Existing defenses are overly restrictive, as they block all suspicious message exchanges, thus preventing any app from receiving messages. To better secure message-based communication, we present a model that strengthens security, while also allowing untrusted-but-not-malicious apps to execute their business logic. Our model, HTPD, introduces two novel mechanisms: hidden transmission and polymorphic delivery. Sensitive messages are transmitted hidden in an encrypted envelope. Their delivery is polymorphic: as determined by the destination’s trustworthiness, it can be delivered no data, raw data, or encrypted data. To allow an untrusted destination to operate on encrypted data deliveries, HTPD integrates homomorphic and convergent encryption. We concretely realize HTPD as PoliCC, a plug-in replacement of Android Inter-Component Communication (ICC) middleware. PoliCC mitigates three classic Android data leakage attacks, while allowing untrusted apps to perform useful operations on delivered messages. Our evaluation shows that PoliCC supports secure message-based communication within and across devices by trading off performance costs, programming effort overheads, and security11This article is a revised and extended version of our prior paper, published in the 17th EAI International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks (SecureComm 2021) (Liu et al., 2021).

Communication-based attacks detection in android applications

The Android operating system provides a rich Inter-Component Communication (ICC) method that brings enormous convenience. However, the Android ICC also increases security risks. To address this problem, a formal method is proposed to model and detect inter-component communication behavior in Android applications. Firstly, we generate data flow graphs and data facts for each component through component-level data flow analysis. Secondly, our approach treats ICC just like method calls. After analyzing the fields and data dependencies of the intent, we identify the ICC caller and callee, track the data flow between them, and construct the ICC model. Thirdly, the behavior model of Android applications is constructed by a formal mapping method for component data flow graph based on Pi calculus. The runtime sensitive path trigger detection algorithm is then given. Communication-based attacks are detected by analyzing intent abnormity. Finally, we analyze the modeling and detection efficiency, and compare it with relevant methods. Analysis of 57 real-world applications partly verifies the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Security code smells in Android ICC

Android Inter-Component Communication (ICC) is complex, largely unconstrained, and hard for developers to understand. As a consequence, ICC is a common source of security vulnerability in Android apps. To promote secure programming practices, we have reviewed related research, and identified avoidable ICC vulnerabilities in Android-run devices and the security code smells that indicate their presence. We explain the vulnerabilities and their corresponding smells, and we discuss how they can be eliminated or mitigated during development. We present a lightweight static analysis tool on top of Android Lint that analyzes the code under development and provides just-in-time feedback within the IDE about the presence of such smells in the code. Moreover, with the help of this tool we study the prevalence of security code smells in more than 700 open-source apps, and manually inspect around 15% of the apps to assess the extent to which identifying such smells uncovers ICC security vulnerabilities.

CrashSafe: a formal model for proving crash-safety of Android applications

Each software application running on Android powered devices consists of application components that communicate with each other to support application’s functionality for enhanced user experience of mobile computing. Application components inside Android system communicate with each other using inter-component communication mechanism based on messages called intents. An android application crashes if it invokes an intent that can not be received by (or resolved to) any application on the device. Application crashes represent a severe fault that relates to compromised users’ experience, consequently resulting in decreased ratings, usage trends and revenues for such applications. To address this issue—by formally proving crash-safety property of Android applications—we have defined a formal model of Android inter-component communication using Coq theorem prover. The mathematical model defined in theorem prover allows one to prove the properties of inter-component communication system and check the correctness of the proof in an automated way. To demonstrate the significance of the formal model developed, we carried proof of crash-safety of Android applications using Coq tool. The proposed solution named CrashSafe supports a formal approach that enables one to (i) check the correctness of inter-component communication in Android systems and (ii) establish a formal foundation for other tools to assess Android applications’ reliability and safety.

Composite Constant Propagation and its Application to Android Program Analysis

Many program analyses require statically inferring the possible values of composite types. However, current approaches either do not account for correlations between object fields or do so in an ad hoc manner. In this paper, we introduce the problem of composite constant propagation. We develop the first generic solver that infers all possible values of complex objects in an interprocedural, flow and context-sensitive manner, taking field correlations into account. Composite constant propagation problems are specified using COAL, a declarative language. We apply our COAL solver to the problem of inferring Android Inter-Component Communication (ICC) values, which is required to understand how the components of Android applications interact. Using COAL, we model ICC objects in Android more thoroughly than the state-of-the-art. We compute ICC values for 489 applications from the Google Play store. The ICC values we infer are substantially more precise than previous work. The analysis is efficient, taking two minutes per application on average. While this work can be used as the basis for many whole-program analyses of Android applications, the COAL solver can also be used to infer the values of composite objects in many other contexts.