A Component-Sensitive Static Analysis Based Approach for Modeling Intents in Android Apps

The Android Inter Component Communication (ICC) model plays an important role in providing users with a wide range of features both within and across apps. Accurate information about ICCs is important for a range of program analysis-based security and verification techniques. These techniques use static analysis to infer links between Android components in bundles of apps and then identify potential security problems with these communications. However, existing ICC analyses have limitations in terms of their accuracy when Intents are constructed using ICC information. To address these limitations, we introduce a multi-level component-sensitive static analysis technique to efficiently and accurately compute ICC information in these scenarios. We compared our approach with state of the art ICC analysis techniques and found that our approach is more accurate and has a faster execution time.