  Android is the most popular operating systems for smartphones and is also
well-known for its flexibility and security. However, although it is overall
considered very secure, there are still some vulnerabilities occasionally
discovered that allow getting user sensitive information bypassing security
controls and boundaries: among these, side-channel vulnerabilities are a
significant concern these days. Although there are several types of
side-channel vulnerabilities, ones focused on APIs still represent a great area
to explore, which, until now, has often been analysed manually. Only in the
latest years, there have been published some automatic solutions which focus on
performing automatic scanning of side-channel flaws in Android, created due to
the increasing codebase of the operating system; however, they present some
limitations.
  This paper introduces a new approach to discover Android NDK side-channel
leaks, which at the best of the author knowledge have never been investigated
through the usage of automatic or semi-automatic solutions. The approach
described in the work, allowed to identify more than 8 new side-channel leaks
in several Android NDK functions,which permitted to infer with great accuracy
application and websites launches on a victim device. The findings represents
the first discovered side-channel leaks in Android NDK functions, and were
responsibly disclosed to the Android Security Team of Google.
