Security Implications of Reflection across the Android Ecosystem

As Android continues to evolve into a general-purpose operating system beyond smartphones, reflection provides adversaries with a practical mechanism to evade modern API restrictions and undermine defenses that rely on static linkage. In this thesis, we show that, despite the mitigation measures introduced by Google, reflection remains a persistent and systemic threat across the Android ecosystem. We position reflection as the central exploitation mechanism and demonstrate how both traditional and novel attacks can be executed using reflection as a gateway. In this work, we implement three representative attacks: an Audio Service attack, an Intent Storm attack, and a Launcher attack. We evaluate them across Android Studio emulator images (mobile, TV, Wear OS, and AAOS/OEM) and multiple physical devices spanning API levels 30–36. The resulting behaviours include service disruption and sustained system server load, with emulator instances often requiring cold boot recovery and physical devices exhibiting auto reboot along with noticeable thermal spikes. Our findings highlight that reflection enables adaptable, version-resilient exploitation patterns that amplify impact through concurrency and runtime discovery, motivating the need for stronger policy enforcement and monitoring of reflective access paths and high frequency system-service interactions across Android form factors.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science (M.Sc.)

Level thesis:degree_level

Masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Science

Grantor

University of Saskatchewan

Year dc:date.issued

2026

Author dc:creator

• Khan, Faiyaz

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Stakhanova, Natalia

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Dutchyn, Christopher
• Eager, Derek

• Android Security, Java Reflection, Reflection-based Attacks

Language dc:language.iso

en

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/10388/17995

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:harvest.usask.ca:10388/17995