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ProMal: precise window transition graphs for android via synergy of program analysis and machine learning

Published: 05 July 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Mobile apps have been an integral part in our daily life. As these apps become more complex, it is critical to provide automated analysis techniques to ensure the correctness, security, and performance of these apps. A key component for these automated analysis techniques is to create a graphical user interface (GUI) model of an app, i.e., a window transition graph (WTG), that models windows and transitions among the windows. While existing work has provided both static and dynamic analysis to build the WTG for an app, the constructed WTG misses many transitions or contains many infeasible transitions due to the coverage issues of dynamic analysis and over-approximation of the static analysis. We propose ProMal, a "tribrid" analysis that synergistically combines static analysis, dynamic analysis, and machine learning to construct a precise WTG. Specifically, ProMal first applies static analysis to build a static WTG, and then applies dynamic analysis to verify the transitions in the static WTG. For the unverified transitions, ProMal further provides machine learning techniques that leverage runtime information (i.e., screenshots, UI layouts, and text information) to predict whether they are feasible transitions. Our evaluations on 40 real-world apps demonstrate the superiority of ProMal in building WTGs over static analysis, dynamic analysis, and machine learning techniques when they are applied separately.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ICSE '22: Proceedings of the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering
May 2022
2508 pages
ISBN:9781450392211
DOI:10.1145/3510003
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 05 July 2022

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  1. deep learning
  2. mobile apps
  3. static analysis
  4. window transition graph

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  • (2024)Mobile Bug Report Reproduction via Global Search on the App UI ModelProceedings of the ACM on Software Engineering10.1145/36608241:FSE(2656-2676)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2024
  • (2023)DeUEDroid: Detecting Underground Economy Apps Based on UTG SimilarityProceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/3597926.3598051(223-235)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2023
  • (2023)Ex Pede Herculem: Augmenting Activity Transition Graph for Apps via Graph Convolution NetworkProceedings of the 45th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE48619.2023.00168(1983-1995)Online publication date: 14-May-2023

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