Nipdroid: An Enhanced Detection Mechanism for Android IPC

As one of the most popular mobile operating system, Android has been troubled by privilege escalation attacks. This is because that the original Android ignores the inspection of transmitted data in intent. It only checks the permission of intent to determine whether the Inter-Process Communication (IPC) could continue. We developed Nipdroid to solve the mentioned defect in Android IPC detection. Nipdroid is based on the technology of marking and tracking sensitive data. After the original Android detection, Nipdroid extracts the sensitive tags from intent, and matches them with the permission lists of both communication apps, and then checks whether there is unreasonable data transmission in IPC. Experiments show that Nipdroid is effective on both preventing privilege escalation attacks and protecting user's sensitive data.