a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t This paper proposes a type and effect system for analyzing activation flow between components through intents in Android programs. The activation flow information is necessary for all Android analyses such as a secure information flow analysis for Android programs. We first design a formal semantics for a core of featherweight Android/Java, which can addres...

Over the last two years Android became the most popular mobile operating system. But Android is also targeted by an over-proportional share of malware. In this paper we systematize the knowledge about the Android security mechanisms and formulate how the pitfalls can be avoided when building a mobile operating system.

When we use a mobile device which runs Android, we usually look for the basic features such as call, texting, gaming, internet browsing, camera and music. However Android devices can be made more powerful and its power can be utilized in a larger scale once it has been rooted. Keywords-Root, Rooting, Android, Recovery, Bootloader,

Android users have been provided with some level of disk encryption since Android 3.0 “Honeycomb”. This is marketed as ‘Full Disk’ encryption (FDE). FDE allows users to encrypt their /data partition. The major problem with FDE is that after rebooting, multiple critical functions of the device are unusable without user interaction. File Based encryption (FBE) was introduced to overcome this issu...

Many handheld devices have been developed in the mobile industry. Most mobile devices in the market are carried Android operating system. Android also supports many other hardware components that increase mobile devices functionality. The operating system can be used for multimedia, touch screen, number of types of sensors and 2D/3D graphics. Due to open source license, many manufactures integr...

Android OS is currently the most widespread mobile operating system and is very likely to remain so in the near future. The number of available Android applications will soon reach the staggering figure of 500,000, with an average of 20,000 applications being introduced in the Android Market over the last 6 months. Since many applications (e.g., home banking applications) deal with sensitive da...

Mobile malware has been growing in scale and complexity spurred by the unabated uptake of smartphones worldwide. Android is fast becoming the most popular mobile platform resulting in sharp increase in malware targeting the platform. Additionally, Android malware is evolving rapidly to evade detection by traditional signature-based scanning. Despite current detection measures in place, timely d...

At the time of this writing, Android devices are widely used, and many studies considering methods of forensic acquisition of data from Android devices have been conducted. Similarly, a diverse collection of smartphone forensic tools has also been introduced. However, studies conducted thus far do not normally guarantee data integrity required for digital forensic investigations. Therefore, thi...

Android is a popular mobile-device platform developed by Google. Android’s application model is designed to encourage applications to share their code and data with other applications. While such sharing can be tightly controlled with permissions, in general users cannot determine what applications will do with their data, and thereby cannot decide what permissions such applications should run ...

As being a representative mobile operating system in the world, Android OS has been part of users’ daily life. Unfortunately, the rapid expansion of Android third-markets introduces malware aiming at Android applications at an alarming rate, which poses great threats to its users. Current research about the privacy leakage in Android mostly focuses on Activity, Service and Content Providers. Li...