Defending android applications availability

There are over a billion devices running the Android operating system. It is being used globally in personal, public, private and government organizations. Device and application availability, often overlooked in research, is a huge component to globally maintaining healthy applications and personal communications. Published research into Android application availability threats and vulnerabilities is limited and incomplete. At most, published research on static analysis techniques used to prevent and thwart Android availability denial of service has been discussed as an aside in only a few papers. To fill the research gap in understanding, this paper examines Android device denial of service techniques both at a system level and at an application level. Our research quantitatively examines applications' availability risks. These risks are used to develop Android mitigation techniques for application denial of service scenarios and inform the development of our third contribution produced from this research. In our third contribution, we introduce a novel open source Android application, the App-Nanny, as a watchdog application to help ensure that applications are playing fair on the device. Lastly, we give insights into future mobile availability testing which includes developing a ChaosMonkeyApp helping to ensure hardening and resiliency in both devices and their running applications.