Android taint flow analysis for app sets

Abstract

One approach to defending against malicious Android applications has been to analyze them to detect potential information leaks. This paper describes a new static taint analysis for Android that combines and augments the FlowDroid and Epicc analyses to precisely track both inter-component and intra-component data flow in a set of Android applications. The analysis takes place in two phases: given a set of applications, we first determine the data flows enabled individually by each application, and the conditions under which these are possible; we then build on these results to enumerate the potentially dangerous data flows enabled by the set of applications as a whole. This paper describes our analysis method, implementation, and experimental results.