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Android’s flexible communication model allows interactions among third-party apps, but it also leads to inter-app security vulnerabilities. Specifically, malicious apps can eavesdrop on interactions between other apps or exploit the functionality of those apps, which can expose a user’s sensitive information to attackers. While the state-of-the-art tools have focused on detecting inter-app vulnerabilities in Android, they neither accurately analyze realistically large numbers of apps nor effectively deliver the identified issues to users. This paper presents SEALANT, a novel tool that combines static analysis and visualization techniques that, together, enable accurate identification of inter-app vulnerabilities as well as their systematic visualization. SEALANT statically analyzes architectural information of a given set of apps, infers vulnerable communication channels where inter-app attacks can be launched, and visualizes the identified information in a compositional representation. SEALANT has been demonstrated to accurately identify inter-app vulnerabilities from hundreds of real-world Android apps and to effectively deliver the identified information to users.
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Inter-app communication between Android apps developed in app-inventor and Android studio
Communications between mobile apps are an important aspect of mobile platforms. Android is specifically designed with inter-app communication in mind and depends on this to provide different platform specific functionalities. Android Apps can either be designed with the help of Android SDK and using IDEs such as Android Studio or by using a browser based platform called App Inventor. These two development platforms provide their own technique for inter-app communication in the same platform, however lack an established method of inter-app communication when apps are developed using the two seperate development platforms. This paper provides the missing information required for the app communications and presents the method for sending and receiving arguments between apps developed in these two platforms. The paper also outlines the significance of the result, and examines their limitations.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1332531
- PAR ID:
- 10018255
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- MOBILESoft '16 Proceedings of the International Workshop on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 17 to 18
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/2897073.2897117
