IconIntent: automatic identification of sensitive UI widgets based on icon classification for Android apps

Many mobile applications (i.e., apps) include UI widgets to use or collect users' sensitive data. Thus, to identify suspicious sensitive data usage such as UI-permission mismatch, it is crucial to understand the intentions of UI widgets. However, many UI widgets leverage icons of specific shapes (object icons) and icons embedded with text (text icons) to express their intentions, posing challenges for existing detection techniques that analyze only textual data to identify sensitive UI widgets. In this work, we propose a novel app analysis framework, IconIntent, that synergistically combines program analysis and icon classification to identify sensitive UI widgets in Android apps. IconIntent automatically associates UI widgets and icons via static analysis on app's UI layout files and code, and then adapts computer vision techniques to classify the associated icons into eight categories of sensitive data. our evaluations of IconIntent on 150 apps from Google Play show that IconIntent can detect 248 sensitive UI widgets in 97 apps, achieving a precision of 82.4%. When combined with Supor, the state-of-the-art sensitive UI widget identification technique based on text analysis, Supor +IconIntent can detect 487 sensitive UI widgets (101.2% improvement over Supor only), and reduces suspicious permissions to be inspected by 50.7% (129.4% improvement over Supor only).