Android Static Taint Analysis of Dynamic Loading and Reflection Mechanism

Privacy leakage is one of the most important issues in the current Android security. The present most important method to detect privacy leakage is taint analysis. Because of its high code coverage and low false negative, the technique of static taint analysis is widely used in the detection of Android privacy leakage. However, the existing static taint analysis tools cannot do effective taint analysis for Android dynamic loading and reflection mechanism. Taking into account the present situation that Android dynamic loading and reflection mechanism are being used more and more widely, we focus on how to enable static taint analysis tools to effectively deal with Android dynamic loading and reflection mechanism. We modify the Android source code to enable the Android system to timely store the loaded dex files and reflection invocation information during the running process of an Android app. This information will be used to guide the static taint analysis process of the app and a policy that replacing the reflective method invocation with non-reflective method invocation is proposed. Based on these ideas, a taint analysis tool—DyLoadDroid is proposed, which has made some improvements of the state-of-the-art static taint analysis tool—FlowDroid and can do effective taint analysis for Android dynamic loading and reflection mechanism. Sufficient experimental results show that DyLoadDroid is very effective in tackling the problem of static taint analysis of Android dynamic loading and reflection mechanism.