Reducing attack surfaces for intra-application communication in android

Abstract

The complexity of Android's message-passing system has led to numerous vulnerabilities in third-party applications. Many of these vulnerabilities are a result of developers confusing inter-application and intra-application communication mechanisms. Consequently, we propose modifications to the Android platform to detect and protect inter-application messages that should have been intra-application messages. Our approach automatically reduces attack surfaces in legacy applications. We describe our implementation for these changes and evaluate it based on the attack surface reduction and the extent to which our changes break compatibility with a large set of popular applications. We fix 100% of intra-application vulnerabilities found in our previous work, which represents 31.4% of the total security flaws found in that work. Furthermore, we find that 99.4% and 93.0% of Android applications are compatible with our sending and receiving changes, respectively.