This document describes how application developers can use the security features provided by Android. A more general Android Security Overview is provided in the Android Open Source Project.
Android is a privilege-separated operating system, in which each application runs with a distinct system identity (Linux user ID and group ID). Parts of the system are also separated into distinct identities. Linux thereby isolates applications from each other and from the system.
Additional finer-grained security features are provided through a "permission" mechanism that enforces restrictions on the specific operations that a particular process can perform, and per-URI permissions for granting ad-hoc access to specific pieces of data.
Security Architecture
A central design point of the Android security architecture is that no application, by default, has permission to perform any operations that would adversely impact other applications, the operating system, or the user. This includes reading or writing the user's private data (such as contacts or e-mails), reading or writing another application's files, performing network access, keeping the device awake, etc.
Because Android sandboxes applications from each other, applications must explicitly share resources and data. They do this by declaring the permissions they need for additional capabilities not provided by the basic sandbox. Applications statically declare the permissions they require, and the Android system prompts the user for consent at the time the application is installed. Android has no mechanism for granting permissions dynamically (at run-time) because it complicates the user experience to the detriment of security.
The application sandbox does not depend on the technology used to build an application. In particular the Dalvik VM is not a security boundary, and any app can run native code (see the Android NDK). All types of applications — Java, native, and hybrid — are sandboxed in the same way and have the same degree of security from each other.
Application Signing
All Android applications (.apk files) must be signed with a certificate whose private key is held by their developer. This certificate identifies the author of the application. The certificate does not need to be signed by a certificate authority: it is perfectly allowable, and typical, for Android applications to use self-signed certificates. The purpose of certificates in Android is to distinguish application authors. This allows the system to grant or deny applications access to signature-level permissions and to grant or deny an application's request to be given the same Linux identity as another application.
User IDs and File Access
At install time, Android gives each package a distinct Linux user ID. The identity remains constant for the duration of the package's life on that device. On a different device, the same package may have a different UID; what matters is that each package has a distinct UID on a given device.
Because security enforcement happens at the
process level, the code of any two packages can not normally
run in the same process, since they need to run as different Linux users.
You can use the sharedUserId attribute in the
AndroidManifest.xml's
manifest tag of each package to
have them assigned the same user ID. By doing this, for purposes of security
the two packages are then treated as being the same application, with the same
user ID and file permissions. Note that in order to retain security, only two applications
signed with the same signature (and requesting the same sharedUserId) will
be given the same user ID.
Any data stored by an application will be assigned that application's user
ID, and not normally accessible to other packages. When creating a new file
with getSharedPreferences(String, int),
openFileOutput(String, int), or
openOrCreateDatabase(String, int, SQLiteDatabase.CursorFactory),
you can use the
MODE_WORLD_READABLE and/or
MODE_WORLD_WRITEABLE flags to allow any other
package to read/write the file. When setting these flags, the file is still
owned by your application, but its global read and/or write permissions have
been set appropriately so any other application can see it.
Using Permissions
A basic Android application has no permissions associated with it,
meaning it can not do anything that would adversely impact the user experience
or any data on the device. To make use of protected features of the device,
you must include in your AndroidManifest.xml one or more
<uses-permission>
For example, an application that needs to monitor incoming SMS messages would specify:
<manifest xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
package="com.android.app.myapp" >
<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.RECEIVE_SMS" />
...
</manifest>
At application install time, permissions requested by the application are granted to it by the package installer, based on checks against the signatures of the applications declaring those permissions and/or interaction with the user. No checks with the user are done while an application is running: it either was granted a particular permission when installed, and can use that feature as desired, or the permission was not granted and any attempt to use the feature will fail without prompting the user.
Often times a permission failure will result in a SecurityException being thrown back to the application. However,
this is not guaranteed to occur everywhere. For example, the sendBroadcast(Intent) method checks permissions as data is
being delivered to each receiver, after the method call has returned, so you
will not receive an exception if there are permission failures. In almost all
cases, however, a permission failure will be printed to the system log.
The permissions provided by the Android system can be found at Manifest.permission. Any application may also define and enforce its
own permissions, so this is not a comprehensive list of all possible
permissions.
A particular permission may be enforced at a number of places during your program's operation:
- At the time of a call into the system, to prevent an application from executing certain functions.
- When starting an activity, to prevent applications from launching activities of other applications.
- Both sending and receiving broadcasts, to control who can receive your broadcast or who can send a broadcast to you.
- When accessing and operating on a content provider.
- Binding to or starting a service.
Declaring and Enforcing Permissions
To enforce your own permissions, you must first declare them in your
AndroidManifest.xml using one or more
<permission>
For example, an application that wants to control who can start one of its activities could declare a permission for this operation as follows:
<manifest xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
package="com.me.app.myapp" >
<permission android:name="com.me.app.myapp.permission.DEADLY_ACTIVITY"
android:label="@string/permlab_deadlyActivity"
android:description="@string/permdesc_deadlyActivity"
android:permissionGroup="android.permission-group.COST_MONEY"
android:protectionLevel="dangerous" />
...
</manifest>
The <protectionLevel> attribute is required, telling the system how the
user is to be informed of applications requiring the permission, or who is
allowed to hold that permission, as described in the linked documentation.
The <permissionGroup> attribute is optional, and only used to help the system display
permissions to the user. You will usually want to set this to either a standard
system group (listed in android.Manifest.permission_group) or in more rare cases to one defined by
yourself. It is preferred to use an existing group, as this simplifies the
permission UI shown to the user.
Note that both a label and description should be supplied for the
permission. These are string resources that can be displayed to the user when
they are viewing a list of permissions
(android:labelandroid:description
Here is an example of a label and description for the CALL_PHONE permission:
<string name="permlab_callPhone">directly call phone numbers</string>
<string name="permdesc_callPhone">Allows the application to call
phone numbers without your intervention. Malicious applications may
cause unexpected calls on your phone bill. Note that this does not
allow the application to call emergency numbers.</string>
You can look at the permissions currently defined in the system with the
Settings app and the shell command adb shell pm list permissions.
To use the Settings app, go to Settings > Applications. Pick an app and
scroll down to see the permissions that the app uses. For developers, the adb '-s'
option displays the permissions in a form similar to how the user will see them:
$ adb shell pm list permissions -s All Permissions: Network communication: view Wi-Fi state, create Bluetooth connections, full Internet access, view network state Your location: access extra location provider commands, fine (GPS) location, mock location sources for testing, coarse (network-based) location Services that cost you money: send SMS messages, directly call phone numbers ...
Enforcing Permissions in AndroidManifest.xml
High-level permissions restricting access to entire components of the
system or application can be applied through your
AndroidManifest.xml. All that this requires is including an android:permission attribute on the desired
component, naming the permission that will be used to control access to
it.
Activity permissions
(applied to the
<activity> tag)
restrict who can start the associated
activity. The permission is checked during
Context.startActivity() and
Activity.startActivityForResult();
if the caller does not have
the required permission then SecurityException is thrown
from the call.
Service permissions
(applied to the
<service> tag)
restrict who can start or bind to the
associated service. The permission is checked during
Context.startService(),
Context.stopService() and
Context.bindService();
if the caller does not have
the required permission then SecurityException is thrown
from the call.
BroadcastReceiver permissions
(applied to the
<receiver> tag)
restrict who can send broadcasts to the associated receiver.
The permission is checked after
Context.sendBroadcast() returns,
as the system tries
to deliver the submitted broadcast to the given receiver. As a result, a
permission failure will not result in an exception being thrown back to the
caller; it will just not deliver the intent. In the same way, a permission
can be supplied to
Context.registerReceiver()
to control who can broadcast to a programmatically registered receiver.
Going the other way, a permission can be supplied when calling
Context.sendBroadcast()
to restrict which BroadcastReceiver objects are allowed to receive the broadcast (see
below).
ContentProvider permissions
(applied to the
<provider> tag)
restrict who can access the data in
a ContentProvider. (Content providers have an important
additional security facility available to them called
URI permissions which is described later.)
Unlike the other components,
there are two separate permission attributes you can set:
android:readPermission restricts who
can read from the provider, and
android:writePermission restricts
who can write to it. Note that if a provider is protected with both a read
and write permission, holding only the write permission does not mean
you can read from a provider. The permissions are checked when you first
retrieve a provider (if you don't have either permission, a SecurityException
will be thrown), and as you perform operations on the provider. Using
ContentResolver.query() requires
holding the read permission; using
ContentResolver.insert(),
ContentResolver.update(),
ContentResolver.delete()
requires the write permission.
In all of these cases, not holding the required permission results in a
SecurityException being thrown from the call.
Enforcing Permissions when Sending Broadcasts
In addition to the permission enforcing who can send Intents to a
registered BroadcastReceiver (as described above), you
can also specify a required permission when sending a broadcast. By calling Context.sendBroadcast() with a
permission string, you require that a receiver's application must hold that
permission in order to receive your broadcast.
Note that both a receiver and a broadcaster can require a permission. When this happens, both permission checks must pass for the Intent to be delivered to the associated target.
Other Permission Enforcement
Arbitrarily fine-grained permissions can be enforced at any call into a
service. This is accomplished with the Context.checkCallingPermission()
method. Call with a desired
permission string and it will return an integer indicating whether that
permission has been granted to the current calling process. Note that this can
only be used when you are executing a call coming in from another process,
usually through an IDL interface published from a service or in some other way
given to another process.
There are a number of other useful ways to check permissions. If you have
the pid of another process, you can use the Context method Context.checkPermission(String, int, int)
to check a permission against that pid. If you have the package name of another
application, you can use the direct PackageManager method PackageManager.checkPermission(String, String)
to find out whether that particular package has been granted a specific permission.
URI Permissions
The standard permission system described so far is often not sufficient when used with content providers. A content provider may want to protect itself with read and write permissions, while its direct clients also need to hand specific URIs to other applications for them to operate on. A typical example is attachments in a mail application. Access to the mail should be protected by permissions, since this is sensitive user data. However, if a URI to an image attachment is given to an image viewer, that image viewer will not have permission to open the attachment since it has no reason to hold a permission to access all e-mail.
The solution to this problem is per-URI permissions: when starting an
activity or returning a result to an activity, the caller can set
Intent.FLAG_GRANT_READ_URI_PERMISSION and/or
Intent.FLAG_GRANT_WRITE_URI_PERMISSION. This grants the receiving activity
permission access the specific data URI in the Intent, regardless of whether
it has any permission to access data in the content provider corresponding
to the Intent.
This mechanism allows a common capability-style model where user interaction (opening an attachment, selecting a contact from a list, etc) drives ad-hoc granting of fine-grained permission. This can be a key facility for reducing the permissions needed by applications to only those directly related to their behavior.
The granting of fine-grained URI permissions does, however, require some
cooperation with the content provider holding those URIs. It is strongly
recommended that content providers implement this facility, and declare that
they support it through the
android:grantUriPermissions attribute or
<grant-uri-permissions> tag.
More information can be found in the
Context.grantUriPermission(),
Context.revokeUriPermission(), and
Context.checkUriPermission()
methods.