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I'm developing a monitoring application for Android listening for broadcast intents: whenever some suspicious intent pattern occurs a dialog alerting the users pops up. Indeed the intents must have been triggered by the same application, to avoid useless warnings.

In general this seems not to be possible, for instance I found something here: How to find Intent source in Android? I'm asking if there is a workaround to this, for instance looking into the context or whatsoever. I really need the application name, not the just the application name to do something else.

Cheers, Gil

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Gil Vegliach
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1 Answers1

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I'm developing a monitoring application for Android listening for broadcast intents

I sincerely hope that you fail in your quest, as this should not be possible, for obvious privacy and security reasons.

I'm asking if there is a workaround to this, for instance looking into the context or whatsoever.

AFAIK, no, short of creating your own custom firmware.

CommonsWare
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  • Is it impossible even with Pid/Uid? I actually only need a way to say "this, this and this Intentes came from ONE application, so something suspicious is going on", I don't need the explicit name, but some sort of TAG. Google returned there is getCallingUid(), but this seems to work only with services... – Gil Vegliach Aug 26 '11 at 07:56
  • @user913286: "there is getCallingUid(), but this seems to work only with services" -- it is more that this is only for a direct participant in the communications. You are trying to spy on other applications' communications. This is what spyware does. While you claim to have noble intentions, please understand that what you are trying to do, if possible, would mean that people with nefarious intentions can *also* do it. – CommonsWare Aug 26 '11 at 09:24
  • You're basically right, but this doesn't mean that you don't have to write publicly the solution: even if there were something nefarious possible to do, it's better this would be in the common knowledge, rather than only known to few people, having good or bad intentions. This is why site like Symantec publishes virus and trojan description, to make people aware that something bad can be done. – Gil Vegliach Aug 26 '11 at 23:30
  • @Gil: There is no solution. Android tries not to have blindingly obvious privacy and security holes like the one you are hoping to use for whatever purposes you would really put them to. – CommonsWare Aug 27 '11 at 06:17
  • Yes, it seems there's no solution: I was looking into the source code and there is no information about name/pid/whatever of the sender. If you have any idea how to monitor applications behaviour it would be nice to post here. The only approaches I know till now are via machine learning. – Gil Vegliach Aug 28 '11 at 10:49
  • After two years I found again this question and, just to add at it, we ended up creating our custom firmware. The research project has been published in a short paper at NFM 2012, paper that you can find online googling my name and NFM 2012. (I'm a CO-author though) – Gil Vegliach May 09 '13 at 17:06