An Approach for Modeling and Analyzing Mobile Push Notification Services

Mobile push notifications are an important feature of mobile computing services and it has been widely implemented in mobile systems. However, it also brings vulnerability to the systems on security and reliability. Formal specification and verification is an effective approach for understanding the properties of mobile push notifications and ensuring quality of the system development. Due to the dynamic interaction among multiple systems, security and mobility in mobile computing services, formally modeling and analyzing this type of services is a grand challenge. In this paper, we proposed an approach that models mobile computing services using a high level Petri nets and analyzes them through combining formal verification and testing techniques. The effectiveness of the approach has been demonstrated with case study of a mobile searching service with mobile push notifications built on Amazon simple notification service and Google mobile push notification services.