Android Inter-App Communication Threats, Solutions, and Challenges
This work highlights a critical security problem for Android users and developers, but it is incremental as it primarily reviews and summarizes existing knowledge rather than proposing new solutions.
The paper addresses the challenge of detecting Android malware through app collusion, where multiple apps collaborate via communication channels to perform malicious actions, making single-app analysis insufficient, and it surveys existing vulnerabilities, threats, and detection research.
Researchers and commercial companies have made a lot of efforts on detecting malware in Android platform. However, a recent malware threat, App collusion, makes malware detection challenging. In App collusion, two or more Apps collaborate to perform malicious actions by communicating with each other, which makes single App analysis insufficient. In this paper, we first introduce Android security mechanism and communication channels used by android Applications. Then we summarize the security vulnerabilities and potential threats introduced by App communication. Finally, we discuss state of art researches and challenges on App collusion detection.