TL;DR: This talk will showcase the development of a remote-controlled vehicle with an Android-powered device as its central unit.
Long Version:
Students and researchers around the world often struggle in the early stages of developing robotics and hardware projects. The reason? High cost and connection difficulties of all the sensors and effectors for Arduinos, Raspberry Pi’s, or whatever platform they choose. All of them have a solution right in their hands—or their pockets—with almost no additional costs.
By enabling an Android device to act as a part or center of an embedded system, you can unlock a vast variety of its capabilities—ones that would cost hundreds of dollars to purchase and dozens of hours to connect & set up. Some of them include:
Not to mention the higher level of services they offer through countless libraries ready to be used by developers.
Intents are the starting points for every Android application. The platform is very much built on Activities, potentially from different apps interacting with each other to complete some tasks. This open nature can be an avenue for exploitation.
You have to consider Intents for what they are: inputs. And inputs must be sanitized. With this mentality, you can protect against many attacks, but some can only be avoided with the right architecture and platform support. Google finally made strides in this area with Android 15’s safer Intents. At the same time, you need to understand the attack surface to defend your apps.
We will describe and demonstrate such issues:
At the end of the talk, you will have an understanding of mitigating and remediating many Intent-based Android vulnerabilities.