DryJIN: Detecting Information Leaks in Android Applications

Android devices, handling sensitive data like call records and text messages, are prone to privacy breaches. Existing information flow tracking systems face difficulties in detecting these breaches due to two main challenges: the multi-layered Android platform using different programming languages (Java and C/C++), and the complex, event-driven execution flow of Android apps that complicates tracking, especially across these language barriers. Our system, DryJIN, addresses this by effectively tracking information flow within and across both Java and native modules. Utilizing symbolic execution for native code data flows and integrating it with Java data flows, DryJIN enhances existing static analysis techniques (Argus-SAF, JuCify, and FlowDroid) to cover previously unaddressed information flow patterns. We validated DryJIN ’s effectiveness through a comprehensive evaluation on over 168k apps, including malware and real-world apps, demonstrating its superiority over current state-of-the-art methods.