DroidCap: OS Support for Capability-based Permissions in Android

We present DROIDCAP, a retrofitting of Android's central Binder IPC mechanism to change the way how permissions are being represented and managed in the system. In DROIDCAP, permissions are per-process Binder objectcapabilities. DROIDCAP's design removes Android's UID-based ambient authority and allows the delegation of capabilities between processes to create least-privileged protection domains efficiently. With DROIDCAP, we show that object-capabilities as underlying access control model integrates naturally and backward-compatible into Android's stock permission model and application management. Thus, our Binder capabilities provide app developers with a new path to gradually adopting app compartmentalization, which we showcase at two favorite examples from the literature, privilege separated advertisement libraries and least privileged app components. At the heart of our paradigm shift for representing permissions in Android is an extension to Android's Binder IPC mechanism. Binder IPC is the primary IPC channel for communication among all apps and between system services