Android inter-component communication analysis with intent revision
Cong Tian, Congli Xia, Zhenhua Duan · 2018
Android has been one of the most popular platforms for smart phones, which has reached a 81.2% share in the mobile-phone market. With smart phones being ubiquitous, hackers are most likely to attack them to catch privacy of users. Android applications (also called Android apps) have been proved the effective target. Google Play store has provided billions of Android apps, but unfortunately, the advance has a dark side because security cannot be ensured by many Android apps. Hence, more and more attention has been paid to Android malware. Taint flow analysis has been proved an effective approach to providing potential malicious data flows. It aims at determining whether a sensitive data flows from a source to a sink. The analysis can be executed either dynamically or statically. Dynamic taint analysis [5] relies on testing to reach a appropriate code coverage criterion. It is able to precisely pinpoint leaks, but may be incomplete in exploring all possible executing paths. In contrast, static analysis takes all the possible paths for consideration. But most of the static analyses available for Android apps [1, 3] are inner-component based analysis which are unable to detect leaks across-components.