Security Code Smells in Android ICC
This addresses security risks for Android app developers and users by providing a tool to mitigate common ICC vulnerabilities, though it is incremental as it builds on existing static analysis methods.
The paper tackles security vulnerabilities in Android Inter-Component Communication (ICC) by identifying code smells that indicate these issues, and presents a static analysis tool integrated into Android Lint to detect them in real-time during development, analyzing over 700 open-source apps to assess prevalence.
Android Inter-Component Communication (ICC) is complex, largely unconstrained, and hard for developers to understand. As a consequence, ICC is a common source of security vulnerability in Android apps. To promote secure programming practices, we have reviewed related research, and identified avoidable ICC vulnerabilities in Android-run devices and the security code smells that indicate their presence. We explain the vulnerabilities and their corresponding smells, and we discuss how they can be eliminated or mitigated during development. We present a lightweight static analysis tool on top of Android Lint that analyzes the code under development and provides just-in-time feedback within the IDE about the presence of such smells in the code. Moreover, with the help of this tool we study the prevalence of security code smells in more than 700 open-source apps, and manually inspect around 15% of the apps to assess the extent to which identifying such smells uncovers ICC security vulnerabilities.