Revealing Side Channels in Android: Threat Model and Attack Surfaces
Speaker (s):
Haoyu Ma
Associate Professor
School of Mechanical, Electronic and
Control Engineering
Beijing Jiaotong University
| Date: Time: Venue: | | 27 January 2026, Tuesday 10:30am – 11:30am School of Computing &
Information Systems 1 (SCIS 1)
Level 4, Meeting Room 4-4
Singapore Management University
80 Stamford Road
Singapore 178902 Please register by 26 January 2026. We look forward to seeing you at this research seminar.  | | | | |
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About the Talk
Android is one of the leading operating systems for modern mobile smart devices. With the permission-based access control and fault isolation based on address-space and component modularization, Android enforces independent sandbox environments for third-party applications, with aims to prevent unauthorized resource access and protect user privacy. However, the architecture of Android relies on user-space service components to provide functional APIs, while also retaining certain non-public inter-component communication mechanisms to enable flexible cross-application interoperability. These characteristics, in turn, make the system notably vulnerable to various side-channel attacks. This report shares our latest research achievements in side-channel attacks against the Android system and aims to inspire further discussion on unresolved research challenges regarding this topic.
About the Speaker
Haoyu Ma is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the School of Cyber Science and Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University. Having obtained his PhD degree from Nankai University, Haoyu focuses his research on software and systems security. In recent years, Haoyu also actively participates in research of side channel attacks against operating systems as well as kernel-assisted exploit mitigation.
