Title: HornDroid: Practical and Sound Static Analysis of Android Applications by SMT Solving,
Abstract: We present HornDroid, a new tool for the static analysis of information flow
properties in Android applications. The core idea underlying HornDroid is to
use Horn clauses for soundly abstracting the semantics of Android applications
and to express security properties as a set of proof obligations that are
automatically discharged by an off-the-shelf SMT solver. This approach makes it
possible to fine-tune the analysis in order to achieve a high degree of
precision while still using off-the-shelf verification tools, thereby
leveraging the recent advances in this field. As a matter of fact, HornDroid
outperforms state-of-the-art Android static analysis tools on benchmarks
proposed by the community. Moreover, HornDroid is the first static analysis
tool for Android to come with a formal proof of soundness, which covers the
core of the analysis technique: besides yielding correctness assurances, this
proof allowed us to identify some critical corner-cases that affect the
soundness guarantees provided by some of the previous static analysis tools for
Android.