Research And Implementation Of Android Inter Component Communication Visualization System

Android,including Android system and Android applications,is one of the most important comportments on the smart phone' s market.According to Statista's latest report on this aspect,until the third season of 2015,84.7%of smart phones on the market choose Android system other than the others.What's more,according to a notification by Google,until July 2016,there had been more than two millions applications on Google Play Store,with more than 65 billions downloads.Android applications are loosely-coupled,composed by components.Android components contains four types-Activity,Service,Broadcast Receiver and Content provider,each is responsible for different function.Android operating system offers an inter-component communication mechanism.Components call another component through this mechanism.Inter-component communication allows applications reuse the existing function of another component.This flexibility not only relive the burden of developer,but also guarantee the efficiency of Android system.However,this mechanism may be made used by malicious to leak the owner's private information[23]through Privilege Escalation Attack[17,12,20,7,16,14,15],or eavesdropping the message transferred between components.Android inter-component communication has been taken into account by researches of android security analysis in recent years.However,there are not many related analyzing systems existing,and the feactures about how malicious use this mechanism to launch attacks are not clear.In that context,this paper describes the research and implementation of Android inter-component communication visualization system,offering a specific Android inter-component communication analysis tool,useing android applications' apk files as input,building the algorithm designed according to the inter-component communication mechanism's description on Android documentary to calculate the communicating component pairs,and visiualizing the result to present the feacures of inter-component communication more vividly.Besides,some experiments are arranged at last based on this system to verify the precision of only analysis part of attributes and try to dig out the feactures of malicious' performance on inter component communication.The development of this system contains several influences:First,it offers a specific inter-component communication analysis and visualization tool.Second,this system does not only offer an efficient inter-component communication visualization tool,but also can reveal some security features of softwares' performances on Android inter-component communication aspect through some experiments done based on the tool.Third,it can help IccTA[13],a new inter-component communication privacy leaks' detecting tool by the group I was co-working in at SnT(Interdisciplinary Centre for Security,Reliability and Trust),to verify its accuracy.Forth,this tool can be used directly by existing tools which offer this aspect's function to verify their precisions,and may also be used directly by under development Android inter-component communication security analysis's researches or systems to contribute the inter-component communication path through static analysis.Besides the usages mentioned above,this work can also be useful or extendible for other projects.Such as it can help to check if the applications are interacting with others as expected on users' phone,or help android developers to find out the potential data leak path of their applications.What more,this work offers a powerful security analyzing framework which can be used to contribute a comprehensive Android security analyzing tool by assembling different aspects' security analysis tools on Server part.