The Transitivity-of-Trust Problem in Android Application Interaction

Mobile phones have developed into complex platforms with large numbers of installed applications and a wide range of sensitive data. Application security policies limit the permissions of each installed application. As applications may interact, restricting single applications may create a false sense of security for end users, while data may still leave the mobile phone through other applications. Instead, the information flow needs to be policed for the composite system of applications in a transparent manner. In this paper, we propose to employ static analysis, based on the software architecture and focused on data-flow analysis, to detect information flows between components. Specifically, we aim to reveal transitivity-of-trust problems in multi-component mobile platforms. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach with two Android applications.