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 topdownloaded Android applications on the Google Play store.

Authors

Publication Details

Published
2025-01-01
DOI
https://doi.org/10.14722/ndss.2025.230125
Citations
2
Primary Topic
Advanced Malware Detection Techniques
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
2.97

Funders

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article

MALintent: Coverage Guided Intent Fuzzing Framework for Android

Christopher Kruegel, Fabian Fleischer, Giovanni Vigna, Taesoo Kim et al.
2 citations
Advanced Malware Detection Techniques
2.97
article

MALintent: Coverage Guided Intent Fuzzing Framework for Android

Christopher Kruegel, Fabian Fleischer, Giovanni Vigna, Taesoo Kim, Ammar Askar
article en
2 citations

Abstract

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 topdownloaded Android applications on the Google Play store.

National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, VMware, Advanced Research Projects Agency, Office of Naval Research
Reduced inequalities
Openalex Percentile: Top 11%
Advanced Malware Detection Techniques
2.97
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MALintent: Coverage Guided Intent Fuzzing Framework for Android — Christopher Kruegel, Fabian Fleischer, et al. · (2025) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS