All about activity injection: threats, semantics, and detection

Abstract

Android supports seamless user experience by maintaining activities from different apps in the same activity stack. While such close inter-app communication is essential in the Android framework, the powerful inter-app communication contains vulnerabilities that can inject malicious activities into a victim app's activity stack to hijack user interaction flows. In this paper, we demonstrate activity injection attacks with a simple malware, and formally specify the activity activation mechanism using operational semantics. Based on the operational semantics, we develop a static analysis tool, which analyzes Android apps to detect activity injection attacks. Our tool is fast enough to analyze real-world Android apps in 6 seconds on average, and our experiments found that 1,761 apps out of 129,756 real-world Android apps inject their activities into other apps' tasks.