ICU: A tool for Intent Filtering on Android devices

The usage of smartphone and mobile devices has increased tremendously in recent years and nowadays the most popular OS for smartphones is the Android OS. However, a significant percentage of the users does not realize that there are applications that can threaten their privacy. Any user can download freely applications from the Google Play Store, without being aware of the consequences to his/her privacy. The majority of such downloaded application work with"Intents". Intents are signals that represent an action to be executed within the application or in order to propagate data to remote applications that act as recipients. The problem we study in this paper is how to protect user privacy by intercepting and controlling the Intents. The approach we propose in this paper is to enhance the user's privacy through "Intent" filtering. Specifically, our application intercepts some designated Intents (implicit and broadcast "Intents", featuring suspicious actions) and alerts users with a message containing information about the "Intent" and the action to be executed. Finally, the user can block or allow the "Intent" at will, after reviewing the content of the alerting message.