Apparecium: Revealing Data Flows in Android Applications

Abstract

With Android applications processing not only personal but also business-critical data, efficient and precise data flow analysis has become a major technique to detect apps handling critical data in unwanted ways. Although data flow analysis in general is a thoroughly researched topic, the event-driven lifecycle model of Android has its own challenges and practical application requires for reliable and efficient analysis techniques. In this paper we present Apparecium, a tool to reveal data flows in Android applications. Apparecium has conceptual differences to other techniques, and can be used to find arbitrary data flows inside Android applications. Details about the used techniques and the differences to existing data flow analysis tools are presented, as well as an evaluation against the data flow analysis framework Flow Droid.