SESSION
Session 2D: Android Security 1
Authors, Creators & Presenters: Ammar Askar (Georgia Institute of Technology), Fabian Fleischer (Georgia Institute of Technology), Christopher Kruegel (University of California, Santa Barbara), Giovanni Vigna (University of California, Santa Barbara), Taesoo Kim (Georgia Institute of Technology)
PAPER
MALintent: Coverage Guided Intent Fuzzing Framework for Android
Intents are the primary message-passing mechanism on Android, used for both communication between intra-app and inter-app components. Intents go across the trust boundary of applications and can break the security isolation between them. Due to their shared API with intra-app communication, apps may unintentionally expose functionality leading to important security bugs. MALintent is an open-source fuzzing framework that uses novel coverage instrumentation techniques and customizable bug oracles to find security issues in Android Intent handlers. MALintent is the first Intent fuzzer that applies greybox fuzzing on compiled closed-source Android applications. We demonstrate techniques widely compatible with many versions of Android and our bug oracles were able to find several crashes, vulnerabilities with privacy implications, and memory-safety issues in the top-downloaded Android applications on the Google Play store.
ABOUT NDSS The Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) fosters information exchange among researchers and practitioners of network and distributed system security. The target audience includes those interested in practical aspects of network and distributed system security, with a focus on actual system design and implementation. A major goal is to encourage and enable the Internet community to apply, deploy, and advance the state of available security technologies.
Our thanks to the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium for publishing their Creators, Authors and Presenter’s superb NDSS Symposium 2025 Conference content on the organization’s’ YouTube channel.