Securing interactions of Android applications

Android, the most used platform for smartphones, provides mechanisms to support interactions among applications that run on the same device, it also provides protection mechanisms to rule those interactions. However, developers are responsible for selecting the protection mechanisms that their applications will use and defining them as part of an application installation package; since definition is a manual task, it is prone to errors. This work proposes a tool that statically analyzes an installation package and checks if an application has a minimum set of protection mechanisms to control access from other applications to its resources. Results show that although most applications define protection mechanisms, some of them do not, exposing their resources and users to attacks.