Capturing inter-process communication for runtime verification on android

Abstract

Runtime verification (RV) covering the whole Android system is challenging, due to the lack of support for analyzing and monitoring events across multiple processes. Existing RV frameworks for Android, which are often built on top of RV tools for Java, only support single-process monitoring. In this paper, we describe an RV framework for Android, capable of performing RV across multiple Android components in different processes by capturing inter-process-communication events. Our approach features an extended regular expression formalism, allowing one to specify RV properties to describe event patterns across processes. We illustrate the use of our framework by detecting nested indirect service use through proxy processes, which is not possible with prevailing RV tools on Android.