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Static Analyses of GUI Behavior in Android Applications

Yang, Shengqian
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1443558986

Abstract Details

2015, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Computer Science and Engineering.
With the fast growing complexity of software systems, developers experience new challenges in understanding program's behavior to reveal performance and functional deficiencies and to support development, testing, debugging, optimization, and maintenance. These issues are especially important to mobile software due to limited computing resources on mobile devices, as well as short development life cycles. The correctness, security, and performance of mobile software is of paramount importance for many millions of users. For software engineering researchers, this raises high expectations for developing a comprehensive toolset of approaches for understanding, testing, checking, and verification of Android software. Static program analyses are essential components of such a toolset. Because of the event-driven and framework-based nature of the Android programming model, it is challenging to clearly understand application semantics and to represent it in static analysis algorithms. This dissertation makes several contributions towards solving this challenge. The ability to understand the interprocedural control flow is critical for reasoning statically about the semantics of a program. For Android, this flow is driven by the Graphical User Interface (GUI) of the application. As the first contribution of this dissertation, we propose a novel technique that analyzes the control flow of GUI event handlers in Android software. We build a callback control-flow graph, using a context-sensitive static analysis of callback methods such as GUI event handlers. The algorithm performs a graph reachability analysis by traversing context-compatible interprocedural control-flow paths and identifying statements that may trigger callbacks, as well as paths that avoid such statements. We also develop a client analysis that builds a static model of the application's GUI. Experimental evaluation shows that this context-sensitive approach leads to substantial precision improvements, while having practical cost. The next contribution of this dissertation is an even more general model and static analysis of the control flow of an Android application's GUI. We propose the window transition graph (WTG), a model representing the possible GUI window sequences and their associated events and callbacks. A key component and contribution of our work is the careful modeling of the stack of currently-active windows, the changes to this stack, and the effects of callbacks related to these changes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first detailed study of this important static analysis problem for Android. We develop novel analysis algorithms for WTG construction and traversal, based on this modeling of the window stack. We also describe an application of the WTG for GUI test generation, using path traversals. The evaluation of the proposed algorithms indicates their effectiveness and practicality. User's interactions with Android applications trigger callbacks in the UI thread. The handling of such events may initialize work on the background in order to perform expensive tasks. Because Android does not allow non-UI threads modifying the GUI state, standard Android "post" operations play a critical role in communicating between background and UI threads. To understand this additional aspect of Android semantics, we introduce a static analysis to model operations that post runnable tasks from non-UI threads to the UI thread's event queue. The results of this analysis are used to create a more general version of the WTG. This new WTG and the related static analysis present an important step toward other more comprehensive modeling of Android semantics. The experimental evaluation of the proposed representation indicates promising overall accuracy improvements. To conclude, this dissertation presents several static analysis techniques to model the behaviors of the GUIs of Android applications. These analyses present essential foundation for developing tools to uncover the symptoms of both functional and performance issues in the mobile system, to perform model-based testing, and to support the understanding, optimization, and evolution of Android software.
Atanas Rountev (Advisor)
Neelam Soundarajan (Committee Member)
Michael Bond (Committee Member)
Po-yin Yen (Committee Member)
118 p.
Computer Science
Android; GUI; static analysis; control-flow analysis; testing

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Yang, S. (2015). Static Analyses of GUI Behavior in Android Applications [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1443558986

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Yang, Shengqian. Static Analyses of GUI Behavior in Android Applications. 2015. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1443558986.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Yang, Shengqian. "Static Analyses of GUI Behavior in Android Applications." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1443558986

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1443558986
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© 2015, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.