Dissecting android inter-component communications via interactive visual explorations

Inter-component communication (ICC) serves as a key element of any Android app's implementation. Specifically, an Android app uses Intents as the main mechanism for ICC to complete tasks such as switching between different user interfaces, starting background services, communicating to other apps on the Android device, and saving or retrieving data from device storage. Thus, dissecting how an app uses ICCs to accomplish its tasks is fundamental to understanding the app's underlying behaviors. Existing works involving ICCs focus on resolving Intents and/or mapping ICCs for security analysis purposes. While the ICC analysis result is potentially informative, it is difficult to digest on its own and has not been utilized for app/ICC comprehension. Also, the result is based on static analysis, and thus does not inform of run-time app behaviors exercised via ICCs. We propose the first approach to dissecting Android ICCs via interactive, dynamic visualizations, empowered by static and dynamic ICC analysis combined. Through multiple semantically linked views and in-situ interaction features, our approach enables real-time visual explorations of ICCs as they are triggered by user inputs to the app under analysis. It conveys rich ICC information while managing limited visual space through various visualization design strategies. Our case studies with a number of commonly used apps have showed promising merits of the approach for both deep ICC comprehension and security vulnerability inspection, as well as practical scalability. Our tool prototype of the approach has enabled quick revelation of inefficient, intrusive, and malicious behaviors in several popular apps that were normally hidden to users.