short-paper

Generating test cases to expose concurrency bugs in Android applications

Authors:

Hua ZhongAuthors Info & Claims

ASE '16: Proceedings of the 31st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering

Pages 648 - 653

https://doi.org/10.1145/2970276.2970320

Published: 25 August 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Mobile systems usually support an event-based model of concurrent programming. This model, although advantageous to maintain responsive user interfaces, may lead to subtle concurrency errors due to unforeseen threads interleaving coupled with non-deterministic reordering of asynchronous events. These bugs are very difficult to reproduce even by the same user action sequences that trigger them, due to the undetermined schedules of underlying events and threads. In this paper, we proposed RacerDroid, a novel technique that aims to expose concurrency bugs in android applications by actively controlling event schedule and thread interleaving, given the test cases that have potential data races. By exploring the state model of the application constructed dynamically, our technique starts first to generate a test case that has potential data races based on the results obtained from existing static or dynamic race detection technique. Then it reschedules test cases execution by actively controlling event dispatching and thread interleaving to determine whether such potential races really lead to thrown exceptions or assertion violations. Our preliminary experiments show that RacerDroid is effective, and it confirms real data races, while at the same time eliminates false warnings for Android apps found in the wild.

References

[1]

V. Raychev, M. T. Vechev, and M. Sridharan. Effective race detection for event-driven programs. In OOPSLA, pages 151–166, 2013.

Digital Library

[2]

B. Petrov, M. Vechev, M. Sridharan, and J. Dolby. Race detection for web applications. In PLDI ’12, pp.251-262.

Digital Library

[3]

D. R. Engler and K. Ashcraft. RacerX: Effective, Static Detection of Race Conditions and Deadlocks. In SOSP, pages 237–252, 2003.

Digital Library

[4]

J. W. Voung, R. Jhala, and S. Lerner. RELAY: Static Race Detection on Millions of Lines of Code. In ESEC/SIGSOFT FSE, pages 205–214, 2007.

Digital Library

[5]

C. Flanagan and S. N. Freund. FastTrack: Efficient and Precise Dynamic Race Detection. In PLDI, pages 121–133, 2009.

Digital Library

[6]

R. H. B. Netzer. Optimal Tracing and Replay for Debugging Shared-Memory Parallel Programs. In Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Debugging, pages 1–11, 1993.

Digital Library

[7]

C.-H. Hsiao, J. Yu, S. Narayanasamy, Z. Kong, C. L. Pereira, G. A. Pokam, P. M. Chen, and J. Flinn. Race detection for event-driven mobile applications. In PLDI ’14, pp.326-336.

Digital Library

[8]

P. Maiya, A. Kanade, and R. Majumdar. Race detection for android applications. In PLDI ’14, pp.316-325.

Digital Library

[9]

P. Bielik, V. Raychev, and M. T. Vechev. Scalable race detection for android applications. In OOPSLA, pages 332– 348. ACM, 2015.

Digital Library

[10]

G. Safi, A. Shahbazian, W.G. J. Halfond, and N. Medvidovic. Detecting event anomalies in event-based systems. In FSE 2015, pp.25-37.

Digital Library

[11]

Yu Lin, Cosmin Radoi, and Danny Dig. Retrofitting concurrency for Android applications through refactoring. In FSE 2014, pp.341-252.

Digital Library

[12]

A. M. Fard, M. Mirzaaghaei, and A. Mesbah. Leveraging existing tests in automated test generation for web applications. In ASE 2014, pages 67–78.

Digital Library

[13]

W. Choi, G. Necula, and K. Sen. Guided gui testing of android apps with minimal restart and approximate learning. In OOPSLA ’13, pp.623-640.

Digital Library

[14]

Tanzirul Azim and Iulian Neamtiu. Targeted and depth-first exploration for systematic testing of android apps. In OOPSLA ’13, pp.641-660.

Digital Library

[15]

Shengqian Yang, Dacong Yan, Haowei Wu, Yan Wang, and Atanas Rountev. Static control-flow analysis of user-driven callbacks in Android applications. In ICSE '15, pp.89-99.

Digital Library

[16]

Shengqian Yang, Hailong Zhang, Haowei Wu, et. al. Static Window Transition Graphs for Android. In ASE’15, pp.658- 668.

[17]

Robtotium. Github. https://github.com/RobotiumTech /robotium

[18]

Espresso. https://google.github.io/android-testing-supportlibrary/docs/espresso/

[19]

Smali. Github. https://github.com/JesusFreke/smali

[20]

Koushik Sen. 2008. Race directed random testing of concurrent programs. In PLDI '08, pp.11-21.

Digital Library

[21]

O. Edelstein, E. Farchi, Y. Nir, G. Ratsaby, and S. Ur. Multithreaded Java program test generation. IBM Systems Journal, 41(1): 111–125, 2002

Digital Library

[22]

S. D. Stoller. Testing concurrent Java programs using randomized scheduling. In Workshop on Runtime Verification (RV’ 02), volume 70 of ENTCS, 2002

[23]

K. Sen. Effective random testing of concurrent programs. In ASE’ 07, pp. 323-332.

Digital Library

[24]

Lorenzo Gomez, Iulian Neamtiu, Tanzirul Azim, and Todd Millstein. RERAN: timing- and touch-sensitive record and replay for Android. In ICSE '13, pp.72-81.

Digital Library

[25]

Hu, Yongjian, Tanzirul Azim, and Iulian Neamtiu. "Versatile yet lightweight record-and-replay for Android." In OOPSLA’15, pp.349-366.

Digital Library

[26]

Android Accessibility. http://developer.android.com/guide/ topics/ui/accessibility/index.html

[27]

H. Yee, S. Pattanaik, and D. P. Greenberg. Spatiotemporal Sensitivity and Visual Attention for Efficient Rendering of Dynamic Environments. ACM Trans. Graph., 20(1), Jan. 2001.

Digital Library

[28]

UI Automator. http://developer.android.com/tools/testingsupport-library/index.html#UIAutomator.

Cited By

Arcuschin IDi Meo LAuer MGaleotti JFraser G(2024)Brewing Up Reliability: Espresso Test Generation for Android Apps2024 IEEE Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST)10.1109/ICST60714.2024.00025(185-196)Online publication date: 27-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICST60714.2024.00025
Cui BWang MZhang CYan JYan JZhang J(2023)Detection of Java Basic Thread Misuses Based on Static Event Analysis2023 38th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE)10.1109/ASE56229.2023.00145(1049-1060)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ASE56229.2023.00145
Arcuschin ICiccaroni CGaleotti JRojas JGarrido AWong WDe Angelis GDo HNguyen B(2022)On the feasibility and challenges of synthesizing executable Espresso testsProceedings of the 3rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Automation of Software Test10.1145/3524481.3527234(92-102)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2022
https://doi.org/10.1145/3524481.3527234
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Generating test cases to expose concurrency bugs in Android applications
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software verification and validation
      1. Software defect analysis
        Software testing and debugging

Recommendations

Retrofitting concurrency for Android applications through refactoring
FSE 2014: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering

Running compute-intensive or blocking I/O operations in the UI event thread of smartphone apps can severely degrade responsiveness. Despite the fact that Android supports writing concurrent code via AsyncTask, we know little about how developers use ...
nAdroid: statically detecting ordering violations in Android applications
CGO '18: Proceedings of the 2018 International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization

Modern mobile applications use a hybrid concurrency model. In this model, events are handled sequentially by event loop(s), and long-running tasks are offloaded to other threads. Concurrency errors in this hybrid concurrency model can take multiple forms:...
Applying transactional memory to concurrency bugs
ASPLOS XVII: Proceedings of the seventeenth international conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems

Multithreaded programs often suffer from synchronization bugs such as atomicity violations and deadlocks. These bugs arise from complicated locking strategies and ad hoc synchronization methods to avoid the use of locks. A survey of the bug databases of ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ASE '16: Proceedings of the 31st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering

August 2016

899 pages

ISBN:9781450338455

DOI:10.1145/2970276

General Chair:
David Lo
Singapore Management University, Singapore
,
Program Chairs:
Sven Apel
University of Passau, Germany
,
Sarfraz Khurshid
University of Texas at Austin, USA

Copyright © 2016 ACM.

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]

Sponsors

SIGAI: ACM Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence
SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering
IEEE-CS: Computer Society

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 25 August 2016

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Short-paper

Funding Sources

National Natural Science Foundation of China
National Basic Research Program of China

Conference

ASE'16

Sponsor:

SIGAI
SIGSOFT
IEEE-CS

ASE'16: ACM/IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering

September 3 - 7, 2016

Singapore, Singapore

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 82 of 337 submissions, 24%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

17
Total Citations
View Citations
574
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)6
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1

Reflects downloads up to 13 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Arcuschin IDi Meo LAuer MGaleotti JFraser G(2024)Brewing Up Reliability: Espresso Test Generation for Android Apps2024 IEEE Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST)10.1109/ICST60714.2024.00025(185-196)Online publication date: 27-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICST60714.2024.00025
Cui BWang MZhang CYan JYan JZhang J(2023)Detection of Java Basic Thread Misuses Based on Static Event Analysis2023 38th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE)10.1109/ASE56229.2023.00145(1049-1060)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ASE56229.2023.00145
Arcuschin ICiccaroni CGaleotti JRojas JGarrido AWong WDe Angelis GDo HNguyen B(2022)On the feasibility and challenges of synthesizing executable Espresso testsProceedings of the 3rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Automation of Software Test10.1145/3524481.3527234(92-102)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2022
https://doi.org/10.1145/3524481.3527234
Zhao YSu TLiu YZheng WWu XKavuluru RHalfond WYu T(2022)ReCDroid+: Automated End-to-End Crash Reproduction from Bug Reports for Android AppsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/348824431:3(1-33)Online publication date: 7-Mar-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3488244
Liu QPan LCui BYan JZhang J(2021)Dynamic Detection of AsyncTask Related Defects2021 IEEE 21st International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security (QRS)10.1109/QRS54544.2021.00047(357-366)Online publication date: Dec-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/QRS54544.2021.00047
Kong PLi LGao JRiom TZhao YBissyandé TKlein J(2021)ANCHOR: locating android framework-specific crashing faultsAutomated Software Engineering10.1007/s10515-021-00290-128:2Online publication date: 1-Nov-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10515-021-00290-1
Luo CGoncalves JVelloso EKostakos V(2020)A Survey of Context Simulation for Testing Mobile Context-Aware ApplicationsACM Computing Surveys10.1145/337278853:1(1-39)Online publication date: 6-Feb-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3372788
Pan LCui BLiu HYan JWang SYan JZhang JDevanbu PCohen MZimmermann T(2020)Static asynchronous component misuse detection for Android applicationsProceedings of the 28th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3368089.3409699(952-963)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3368089.3409699
Salehnamadi NAlshayban AAhmed IMalek SGrundy JLe Goues CLo D(2020)ER catcherProceedings of the 35th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1145/3324884.3416639(324-335)Online publication date: 21-Dec-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3324884.3416639
Wu DHe DChen SXue J(2020)Exposing Android Event-Based Races by Selective Branch Instrumentation2020 IEEE 31st International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE)10.1109/ISSRE5003.2020.00033(265-276)Online publication date: Oct-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/ISSRE5003.2020.00033
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents