Understanding Android Application Programming and Security: A Dynamic Study

Most existing research for Android focuses on particular security issues, yet there is little broad understanding of Android application run-time characteristics and their implications. To mitigate this gap, we present the first systematic dynamic characterization study of Android apps that targets a broad understanding of application behaviors in Android. Through lightweight method-level profiling, we collected 59GB traces of method calls and Intent-based inter-component communication (ICC) from 125 popular Android apps and 62 pairs among them that enabled an intensive empirical investigation of their run-time behaviors. Our study revealed that, among other findings, (1) the application executions were overwhelmingly dominated by the Android framework, (2) Activity components dominated over other types of components and were responsible for most lifecycle callbacks (3) most event handlers dealt with user interactions as opposed to system events, (4) the majority of exercised ICCs did not carry any data payloads, and (5) sensitive data sources and sinks targeted only one/two dominant categories of information or operations. We also discuss the implications of our results for cost-effective program analysis and security defense for Android.