On Discovering Vulnerabilities in Android Applications

With the prosperity of the app economy, more than four million apps have been published in various markets, including Google Play, Apple Store, etc. However, recent studies show that many apps are vulnerable to various attacks for many reasons, such as a short development period, lack of security awareness, etc. In this chapter, we survey the vulnerabilities found in Android apps and the approaches for discovering the vulnerabilities, because Android occupies more than 80% of global market. Besides introducing major vulnerabilities in Android apps, we model how to discover them as graph traversals. Moreover, we discuss the limitations of existing vulnerability detection approaches and suggest future directions of research.