Intent fuzzer: crafting intents of death
Raimondas Sasnauskas, John David Regehr · 2014
We present a fuzzing framework for Intents: the core IPC mechanism for intra- and inter-app communication in Android. Since intents lie at a trust boundary between apps, their correctness is important and thorough testing is warranted. The key challenge is to balance the tension between generating intents that applications expect, permitting deep penetration into application logic, and generating intents that trigger interesting bugs that have not been previously uncovered. Our work strikes this balance using a novel combination of static analysis and random test-case generation. Our intent fuzzer crashed dozens of Google core and top Google Play apps, resulting in app restarts or even in a complete OS reboot.