research-article

Demystifying diehard Android apps

Authors:

Ting WangAuthors Info & Claims

ASE '20: Proceedings of the 35th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering

Pages 187 - 198

https://doi.org/10.1145/3324884.3416637

Published: 27 January 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Smartphone vendors are using multiple methods to kill processes of Android apps to reduce the battery consumption. This motivates developers to find ways to extend the liveness time of their apps, hence the name diehard apps in this paper. Although there are blogs and articles illustrating methods to achieve this purpose, there is no systematic research about them. What's more important, little is known about the prevalence of diehard apps in the wild.

In this paper, we take a first step to systematically investigate diehard apps by answering the following research questions. First, why and how can they circumvent the resource-saving mechanisms of Android? Second, how prevalent are they in the wild? In particular, we conduct a semi-automated analysis to illustrate insights why existing methods to kill app processes could be evaded, and then systematically present 12 diehard methods. After that, we develop a system named DiehardDetector to detect diehard apps in a large scale. The experimental result of applying DiehardDetector to more than 80k Android apps downloaded from Google Play showed that around 21% of apps adopt various diehard methods. Moreover, our system can achieve high precision and recall.

References

[1]

2020. Background Execution Limits. https://developer.android.com/about/versions/oreo/background.

[2]

2020. Broadcasts Overview. https://developer.android.com/guide/components/broadcasts.

[3]

2020. Don't kill my app! https://dontkillmyapp.com/.

[4]

2020. F-Droid. https://f-droid.org.

[5]

2020. Google Play Store, https://play.google.com/store.

[6]

2020. Implicit Broadcast Exceptions, https://developer.android.com/guide/components/broadcast-exceptions.

[7]

2020. Launch Instant App. https://developers.google.com/android/reference/com/google/android/gms/instantapps/Launcher.

[8]

2020. Recents Screen, https://developer.android.com/guide/components/activities/recents.

[9]

2020. Smartphone users still want long-lasting batteries more than shatterproof screens, https://today.yougov.com/topics/technology/articles-reports/2018/02/20/smartphone-users-still-want-longer-battery-life.

[10]

2020. Sticky Service, https://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Service#START_STICKY.

[11]

2020. Understand Tasks and Back Stack. https://developer.android.com/guide/components/activities/tasks-and-back-stack.

[12]

Steven Arzt, Siegfried Rasthofer, Christian Fritz, Eric Bodden, Alexandre Bartel, Jacques Klein, Yves Le Traon, Damien Octeau, and Patrick McDaniel. 2014. Flow-Droid: Precise Context, Flow, Field, Object-sensitive and Lifecycle-aware Taint Analysis for Android Apps. In Proc PLDI.

[13]

Kathy Wain Yee Au, Yi Fan Zhou, Zhen Huang, and David Lie. 2012. PScout: Analyzing the Android Permission Specification. In Proc. CCS.

[14]

Abhijeet Banerjee, Lee Kee Chong, Clement Ballabriga, and Abhik Roychoudhury. 2018. EnergyPatch: Repairing Resource Leaks to Improve Energy-Efficiency of Android Apps. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (2018).

[15]

Antonin Carette, Mehdi Adel Ait Younes, Geoffrey Hecht, Naouel Mona, and Romain Rouvoy. 2017. Investigating the energy impact of Android smells. In Proc. SANER.

[16]

Shaiful Chowdhury, Silvia Di Nardo, Abram Hindle, and Zhen Ming Jiang. 2018. An exploratory study on assessing the energy impact of logging on Android applications. Empirical Software Engineering (2018).

[17]

Yanick Fratantonio, Chenxiong Qian, Simon P Chung, and Wenke Lee. 2017. Cloak and Dagger: From Two Permissions to Complete Control of the UI Feedback Loop. In Proc. S&P.

[18]

Mary Jean Harrold and Mary Lou Soffa. 1994. Efficient Computation of Interprocedural Definition-Use Chains. ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst. (1994).

[19]

Reyhaneh Jabbarvand and Sam Malek. 2017. μDroid: An Energy-Aware Mutation Testing Framework for Android. In Proc. FSE.

[20]

Mario Linares-Vásquez, Carlos Bernal-Cárdenas, Gabriele Bavota, Rocco Oliveto, Massimiliano Di Penta, and Denys Poshyvanyk. 2017. GEMMA: Multi-objective Optimization of Energy Consumption of GUIs in Android Apps. In Proc. ICSE.

Digital Library

[21]

Wellington Oliveira, Renato Oliveira, and Fernando Castor. 2017. A Study on the Energy Consumption of Android App Development Approaches. In Proc. MSR.

Digital Library

[22]

Chuangang Ren, Peng Liu, and Sencun Zhu. 2017. WindowGuard: Systematic Protection of GUI Security in Android. In Proc. NDSS.

[23]

Chuangang Ren, Yulong Zhang, Hui Xue, Tao Wei, and Peng Liu. 2015. Towards Discovering and Understanding Task Hijacking in Android. In Proc. USENIX Security.

[24]

Zhiyong Shan, Iulian Neamtiu, and Raina Samuel. 2018. Self-hiding Behavior in Android Apps: Detection and Characterization. In Proc. ICSE.

Digital Library

[25]

Zhiyong Shan, Raina Samuel, and Iulian Neamtiu. 2019. Device Administrator Use and Abuse in Android: Detection and Characterization. In Proc. MobiCom.

Digital Library

[26]

Yuru Shao, Ruowen Wang, Xun Chen, Ahemd M. Azab, and Z. Morley Mao. 2019. A Lightweight Framework for Fine-Grained Lifecycle Control of Android Applications. In Proc. EuroSys.

[27]

Yulei Sui, Ding Ye, and Jingling Xue. 2014. Detecting memory leaks statically with full-sparse value-flow analysis. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (2014).

Digital Library

[28]

Fengguo Wei, Xingwei Lin, Xinming Ou, Ting Chen, and Xiaosong Zhang. 2018. JN-SAF: Precise and Efficient NDK/JNI-Aware Inter-Language Static Analysis Framework for Security Vetting of Android Applications with Native Code. In Proc. CCS.

Digital Library

[29]

Michelle Y Wong and David Lie. 2018. Tackling runtime-based obfuscation in Android with TIRO. In Proc USENIX Security.

[30]

Lei Xue, Xiapu Luo, Le Yu, Shuai Wang, and Dinghao Wu. 2017. Adaptive unpacking of Android apps. In Proc. ICSE.

Digital Library

[31]

L. Xue, H. Zhou, X. Luo, L. Yu, D. Wu, Y. Zhou, and X. Ma. 2020. PackerGrind: An Adaptive Unpacking System for Android Apps. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (2020).

[32]

Yuxuan Yan, Zhenhua Li, Qi Alfred Chen, Christo Wilson, Tianyin Xu, Ennan Zhai, Yong Li, and Yunhao Liu. 2019. Understanding and Detecting Overlay-based Android Malware at Market Scales. In Proc. MobiSys.

Digital Library

[33]

L. Yu, X. Luo, J. Chen, H. Zhou, T. Zhang, H. Chang, and H. Leung. 2019. PPChecker: Towards Accessing the Trustworthiness of Android Apps' Privacy Policies. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (2019).

[34]

Le Yu, Tao Zhang, Xiapu Luo, and Lei Xue. 2015. AutoPPG: Towards Automatic Generation of Privacy Policy for Android Applicationss. In Proc. SPSM.

Digital Library

[35]

L. Yu, X Zhang, X. Luo, L. Xue, and H. Chang. 2017. Towards Automatically Generating Privacy Policy for Android Apps. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (2017).

[36]

Yajin Zhou and Xuxian Jiang. 2012. Dissecting Android Malware: Characterization and Evolution. In Proc. S&P.

Digital Library

Cited By

Guo HDai HLuo XZheng ZXu GHe FRoychoudhury APaiva AAbreu RStorey M(2024)An Empirical Study on Oculus Virtual Reality Applications: Security and Privacy PerspectivesProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3597503.3639082(1-13)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3597503.3639082
Chen YTang RZuo CZhang XXue LLuo XZhao QRoychoudhury APaiva AAbreu RStorey M(2024)Attention! Your Copied Data is Under Monitoring: A Systematic Study of Clipboard Usage in Android AppsProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3597503.3623317(1-13)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3597503.3623317
Yang SBai GLin RGuo JDiao W(2024)Beyond the Horizon: Exploring Cross-Market Security Discrepancies in Parallel Android Apps2024 IEEE 35th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE)10.1109/ISSRE62328.2024.00059(558-569)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ISSRE62328.2024.00059
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Demystifying diehard Android apps
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software verification and validation

Recommendations

Pro Android Web Apps: Develop for Android using HTML5, CSS3 & JavaScript
Analyzing GUI running fluency for Android apps
MSCC '16: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM Workshop on Mobile Sensing, Computing and Communication

Android as a free open platform has become increasingly popular and been widespread adopted in mobile, tablet, and other devices. However, a great number of issues, such as inadequate quality and the fragmentation phenomenon, have emerged, enhancing the ...
Android TV Apps Development: Building for Media and Games

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ASE '20: Proceedings of the 35th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering

December 2020

1449 pages

ISBN:9781450367684

DOI:10.1145/3324884

General Chair:
John Grundy,
Program Chairs:
Claire Le Goues,
David Lo

Copyright © 2020 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

In-Cooperation

IEEE CS

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 27 January 2021

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

ASE '20

Sponsor:

ASE '20: 35th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering

December 21 - 25, 2020

Virtual Event, Australia

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 82 of 337 submissions, 24%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

8
Total Citations
View Citations
172
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)37
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)13

Reflects downloads up to 25 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Guo HDai HLuo XZheng ZXu GHe FRoychoudhury APaiva AAbreu RStorey M(2024)An Empirical Study on Oculus Virtual Reality Applications: Security and Privacy PerspectivesProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3597503.3639082(1-13)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3597503.3639082
Chen YTang RZuo CZhang XXue LLuo XZhao QRoychoudhury APaiva AAbreu RStorey M(2024)Attention! Your Copied Data is Under Monitoring: A Systematic Study of Clipboard Usage in Android AppsProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3597503.3623317(1-13)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3597503.3623317
Yang SBai GLin RGuo JDiao W(2024)Beyond the Horizon: Exploring Cross-Market Security Discrepancies in Parallel Android Apps2024 IEEE 35th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE)10.1109/ISSRE62328.2024.00059(558-569)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ISSRE62328.2024.00059
Wang CHu BWu H(2022)Energy Minimization for Federated Asynchronous Learning on Battery-Powered Mobile Devices via Application Co-running2022 IEEE 42nd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS)10.1109/ICDCS54860.2022.00095(939-949)Online publication date: Jul-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICDCS54860.2022.00095
McCool DLugtig PSchouten B(2022)Maximum interpolable gap length in missing smartphone-based GPS mobility dataTransportation10.1007/s11116-022-10328-251:1(297-327)Online publication date: 15-Sep-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-022-10328-2
Su SWang HXu G(2021)Towards Understanding iOS App Store Search Advertising: An Explorative Study2021 IEEE/ACM 8th International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems (MobileSoft)10.1109/MobileSoft52590.2021.00011(40-51)Online publication date: May-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/MobileSoft52590.2021.00011
Hu YWang HJi TXiao XLuo XGao PGuo Y(2021)CHAMPProceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00089(933-945)Online publication date: 22-May-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00089
Zhou HWang HWu SLuo XZhou YChen TWang TGrundy J(2021)Finding the missing pieceProceedings of the 36th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1109/ASE51524.2021.9678843(505-516)Online publication date: 15-Nov-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ASE51524.2021.9678843

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.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten