Lintent: Towards security type-checking of Android applications

Abstract

The widespread adoption of Android devices has attracted the attention of a growing computer security audience. Fundamental weaknesses and subtle design flaws of the Android architecture have been identified, studied and fixed, mostly through techniques from data-flow analysis, runtime protection mechanisms, or changes to the operating system. This paper complements this research by developing a framework for the analysis of Android applications based on typing techniques. We introduce a formal calculus for reasoning on the Android inter-component communication API and a type-and-effect system to statically prevent privilege escalation attacks on well-typed components. Drawing on our abstract framework, we develop a prototype implementation of Lintent, a security type-checker for Android applications integrated with the Android Development Tools suite. We finally discuss preliminary experiences with our tool, which highlight real attacks on existing applications. © 2013 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.