An Android Inline Hooking Framework for the Securing Transmitted Data

• Main Authors: Yu-an Tan, Shuo Feng, Xiaochun Cheng, Yuanzhang Li, Jun Zheng
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-07-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: sensitive information leakage; Android; native hook; ELF file format; VirtualXposed
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/20/15/4201

Information leaks can occur through many Android applications, including unauthorized access to sensors data. Hooking is an important technique for protecting Android applications and add security features to them even without its source code. Various hooking frameworks are developed to intercept events and process their own specific events. The hooking tools for Java methods are varied, however, the native hook has few methods. Besides, the commonly used Android hook frameworks cannot meet the requirement of hooking the native methods in shared libraries on non-root devices. Even though some approaches are able to hook these methods, they have limitations or are complicated to implement. In the paper, a feasible hooking approach for Android native methods is proposed and implemented, which does not need any modifications to both the Android framework and app’s code. In this approach, the method’s reference address is modified and control flow is redirected. Beyond that, this study combines this approach with VirtualXposed which aims to run it without root privileges. This hooking framework can be used to enforce security policies and monitor sensitive methods in shared objects. The evaluation of the scheme demonstrates its capability to perform hook operation without a significant runtime performance overhead on real devices and it is compatible and functional for the native hook.