No abstract

Android is nowadays the most popular operating system in the world, not only in the realm of mobile devices, but also when considering desktop and laptop computers. Such a popularity makes it an attractive target for security attacks, also due to the sensitive information often manipulated by mobile apps. The latter are going through a transition in which the Android ecosystem is moving from the usage of Java as the official language for developing apps, to the adoption of Kotlin as the first choice supported by Google. While previous studies have partially studied security weaknesses affecting Java Android apps, there is no comprehensive empirical investigation studying software security weaknesses affecting Android apps considering (and comparing) the two main languages used for their development, namely Java and Kotlin. We present an empirical study in which we: (i) manually analyze 681 commits including security weaknesses fixed by developers in Java and Kotlin apps, with the goal of defining a taxonomy highlighting the types of software security weaknesses affecting Java and Kotlin Android apps; (ii) survey 43 Android developers to validate and complement our taxonomy. Based on our findings, we propose a list of future actions that could be performed by researchers and practitioners to improve the security of Android apps.

Android is the most popular mobile operating system in the world, running on more than 70% of mobile devices. This implies a gigantic and very competitive market for Android apps. Being successful in such a market is far from trivial and requires, besides the tackling of a problem or need felt by a vast audience, the development of high-quality apps. As recently showed in the literature, connectivity issues (e.g., mishandling of zero/unreliable Internet connection) can result in bugs and/or crashes, negatively affecting the app's user experience. While these issues have been studied in the literature, there are no techniques able to automatically detect and report them to developers. We present CONAN, a tool able to detect statically 16 types of connectivity issues affecting Android apps. We assessed the ability of CONAN to precisely identify these issues in a set of 44 open source apps, observing an average precision of 80%. Then, we studied the relevance of these issues for developers by (i) conducting interviews with six practitioners working with commercial Android apps, and (ii) submitting 84 issue reports for 27 open source apps. Our results show that several of the identified connectivity issues are considered as relevant by practitioners in specific contexts, in which connectivity is considered a first-class feature.