Multi-Process Runtime Verification for Android

With the popularity of Android, a huge number of Android apps appear in different markets. As some apps pose significant security risks, it is important to support runtime monitoring and verification on Android. Existing runtime verification frameworks only focus on verifying the events within a single process, ignoring that Android is a multi-process system where different components communicate frequently, and thus lack the ability to analyze and monitor behaviors across app processes. In this paper, we introduce our new runtime verification framework for Android, capable of performing runtime verification across multiple Android components in different processes. Our approach features an extended regular expression formalism, allowing one to specify complete analyses covering the whole Android system. We illustrate the use of our framework with an Android service characterization study and a monitor for permission (mis) use in apps.