Compositional Information Flow Verification for Inter Application Communications in Android System

Abstract

Inter-component communication (ICC) is commonly used in Android for information exchange among different components/apps. However, it also brings severe challenges to information flow security. When data is transferred and processed, the diversity of different security mechanisms in various apps make data more vulnerable to leakage. Although there are several analysis approaches on security verification on inter-component information flow, repetitive verification on the same component during complex interactions increases the overhead, which would affect task execution efficiency and consume more energy. Therefore, we propose a compositional information flow security verification approach, which improves efficiency by separating the intra-app and inter-app analysis and verification process. The experiment and analysis show that our method is more effective than traditional global approaches.