On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 12:04 PM, Rahul Potharaju <[email protected]> wrote:

> I understand when you say the receiver should ask "Do I know or care about
> the sender of this Intent?" and "Is the Intent well-formed according to my
> input validation rules?". But I don't quite understand why the receiver
> should ask the question "Did the sender have a given permission?". Isn't
> this the task of the Security Manager (Reference Monitor) that takes care of
> the access control? Or am I missing something here?

Android does not use a Java Security Manager. And that is a Good Thing
(even if it freaks everybody out). (Dare I mention that Dalvik does
bytecode verification primarily for optimization and not for security?
:) )

You might want to check if the caller had a certain Permission as an
indication that the user has delegated some authority to a class of
apps, and not just a single app by app identity. You could create a
new Permission, or use an existing one. If the caller has that
Permission, then the user has delegated that power to the calling app.

If your component is a Service or a BroadcastReceiver, you can set
this kind of policy declaratively, e.g. the permission attribute of
the <service> or <receiver> tag:

http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/manifest/service-element.html

Otherwise, you can also set this kind of policy imperatively:

http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/security/security.html#enforcement

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