TDroid: exposing app switching attacks in Android with control flow specialization

Abstract

The Android multitasking mechanism can be plagued with app switching attacks, in which a malicious app replaces the legitimate top activity of the focused app with one of its own, thus mounting, e.g., phishing and denial-of-service attacks. Existing market-level defenses are still ineffective, as static analysis is fundamentally unable to reason about the intention of an app and dynamic analysis has low coverage.