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Towards a generic framework for automating extensive analysis of Android applications

Published: 04 April 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Despite much effort in the community, the momentum of Android research has not yet produced complete tools to perform thorough analysis on Android apps, leaving users vulnerable to malicious apps. Because it is hard for a single tool to efficiently address all of the various challenges of Android programming which make analysis difficult, we propose to instrument the app code for reducing the analysis complexity, e.g., transforming a hard problem to a easy-resolvable one. To this end, we introduce in this paper Apkpler, a plugin-based framework for supporting such instrumentation. We evaluate Apkpler with two plugins, demonstrating the feasibility of our approach and showing that Apkpler can indeed be leveraged to reduce the analysis complexity of Android apps.

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Cited By

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  • (2021)Software engineering techniques for statically analyzing mobile apps: research trends, characteristics, and potential for industrial adoptionJournal of Internet Services and Applications10.1186/s13174-021-00134-x12:1Online publication date: 23-Jul-2021
  • (2020)Identification of data propagation paths for efficient dynamic information flow trackingProceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing10.1145/3341105.3373876(92-99)Online publication date: 30-Mar-2020
  • (2017)Mining AndroZoo: A Retrospect2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)10.1109/ICSME.2017.49(675-680)Online publication date: Sep-2017
  • Show More Cited By

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    SAC '16: Proceedings of the 31st Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing
    April 2016
    2360 pages
    ISBN:9781450337397
    DOI:10.1145/2851613
    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 the author(s) 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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    Publication History

    Published: 04 April 2016

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    Author Tags

    1. Android
    2. Apkpler
    3. generic framework
    4. static analysis

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    SAC 2016
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    SAC 2016: Symposium on Applied Computing
    April 4 - 8, 2016
    Pisa, Italy

    Acceptance Rates

    SAC '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 252 of 1,047 submissions, 24%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 1,650 of 6,669 submissions, 25%

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    The 40th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing
    March 31 - April 4, 2025
    Catania , Italy

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2021)Software engineering techniques for statically analyzing mobile apps: research trends, characteristics, and potential for industrial adoptionJournal of Internet Services and Applications10.1186/s13174-021-00134-x12:1Online publication date: 23-Jul-2021
    • (2020)Identification of data propagation paths for efficient dynamic information flow trackingProceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing10.1145/3341105.3373876(92-99)Online publication date: 30-Mar-2020
    • (2017)Mining AndroZoo: A Retrospect2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)10.1109/ICSME.2017.49(675-680)Online publication date: Sep-2017
    • (2016)DroidRA: taming reflection to support whole-program analysis of Android appsProceedings of the 25th International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/2931037.2931044(318-329)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2016
    • (2016)Boosting static analysis of Android apps through code instrumentationProceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering Companion10.1145/2889160.2889258(819-822)Online publication date: 14-May-2016

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