FUSE: Inter-Application Security for Android

The increasingly common use of mobile software platforms such as Android provides convenience and cost savings by consolidating multiple functions within one device. This consolidation comes at a price, however: the interactions between the various software applications (apps) is hard to predict. The underlying operating system provides security mechanisms to isolate apps and control communication between them, but these mechanisms must be used correctly. Tools currently exist to analyze apps in isolation to search for behaviors that might lead to violations of an expected security policy. However, none of these tools currently analyze collections of apps to determine how they interact in a deployed system. Phase I of this effort has demonstrated that such inter-app behavior analysis is indeed feasible through the development of a simple prototype of a tool set we call FUSE. Our Phase II work will consist of maturing the FUSE prototype, building a more sophisticated user interface, and exploring new research directions to improve the scope and precision of the analysis.