Characterizing and Detecting Configuration Compatibility Issues in Android Apps

Huaxun Huang1; Ming Wen2; Lili Wei1; Yepang Liu3; Shing-Chi Cheung1

10.1109/ASE51524.2021.9678556

2021

The 36th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering

1938-4300

978-1-6654-4784-3

2021 36TH IEEE/ACM INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON AUTOMATED SOFTWARE ENGINEERING ASE 2021

517-528

14-20 November 2021

Australia

345 E 47TH ST, NEW YORK, NY 10017 USA

IEEE

XML configuration files are widely used in Android to define an app's user interface and essential runtime information such as system permissions. As Android evolves, it might introduce functional changes in the configuration environment, thus causing compatibility issues that manifest as inconsistent app behaviors at different API levels. Such issues can often induce software crashes and inconsistent look-and-feel when running at specific Android versions. Existing works incur plenty of false positive and false negative issue-detection rules by conducting trivial data-flow analysis while failing to model the XML tree hierarchies of the Android configuration files. Besides, little is known about how the changes in an Android framework can induce such compatibility issues. To bridge such gaps, we conducted a systematic study by analyzing 196 real-world issues collected from 43 popular apps. We identified common patterns of Android framework code changes that induce such configuration compatibility issues. Based on the findings, we propose CONFDROID that can automatically extract rules for detecting configuration compatibility issues. The intuition is to perform symbolic execution based on a model learned from the common code change patterns. Experiment results show that CONFDROID can successfully extract 282 valid issue-detection rules with a precision of 91.9%. Among them, 65 extracted rules can manifest issues that cannot be detected by the rules of state-of-the-art baselines. More importantly, 11 out of them have led to the detection of 107 reproducible configuration compatibility issues that the baselines cannot detect in 30 out of 316 real-world Android apps.

XML configuration Android compatibility static analysis

其他

英语

CPCI-S ; EI

National Natural Science Foundation of China[61932021,61802164,62002125]

Computer Science

Computer Science, Software Engineering

WOS:000779309000045

20220911734428

Android (operating system) ; Application programming interfaces (API) ; Data flow analysis ; Trees (mathematics) ; User interfaces ; XML

Computer Peripheral Equipment:722.2 ; Computer Software, Data Handling and Applications:723 ; Computer Applications:723.5 ; Combinatorial Mathematics, Includes Graph Theory, Set Theory:921.4

人工提交

1.The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
2.Huazhong University of Science and Technology
3.Southern University of Science and Technology

Huaxun Huang,Ming Wen,Lili Wei,et al. Characterizing and Detecting Configuration Compatibility Issues in Android Apps[C]. 345 E 47TH ST, NEW YORK, NY 10017 USA:IEEE,2021:517-528.