A Framework for Detecting and Countering Android UI Attacks via Inspection of IPC Traffic
Joshua Kraunelis, Xinwen Fu, Wei Yu, Wei Zhao · 2018
Android represents an ever-increasing share of the worldwide smart device market. The platform's ubiquity and open nature make Android a prime target for malicious actors. Unfortunately, device fragmentation among manufacturers makes maintaining cyber security difficult, invoking the need for third party security software. We present a framework for detecting and countering deceptive user interface attacks on the Android platform via inspection and analysis of inter-process communication transactions in the operating system. We evaluate our proof of concept implementation on a known class of malware that exploits the Android display system, allowing a malicious application to control the screen and mimic any application launched by the user. We achieve 100% detection rate of this malicious behavior with no false alarms.