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 top-downloaded Android applications on the Google Play store.