Capturing Information Flows inside Android and Qemu Environments

The smartphone market has grown so wide that it assumed a strategic relevance. Today the most common smartphone OSs are Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS. The former is particularly interesting due to its open source nature, that allows everyone to deeply inspect every aspect of the OS. Android source code is also bundled with an hardware emulator, based on the open source software Qemu, that allows the user to run the Android OS without the need of a physical device. We first present a procedure to extract information flows from a generic system. We then focus on Android and Qemu architectures and their logging infrastructures. Finally, we detail what happens inside an Android device in a particular scenario: the system boot.