Android Multitasking Mechanism: Formal Semantics and Static Analysis of Apps

He, Jinlong; Chen, Taolue; Wang, Ping; Zhang, Wu; Yan, Jun

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-34175-6_15

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…Android maintains a list of all programs currently running and swaps between them quickly so that users perceive them to be running simultaneously. Programs swap in and out of being executed in the order of every few milliseconds, but the order in which programs are swapped in and out of being executed will vary depending on a variety of other factors including task priority, which will be determined based on other background and foreground processes (He et al, 2019).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Psychometric scales are also common and include a range of items that attempt to quantify 'problematic' or 'addictive' patterns of usage . While such measurements are typical across social psychology, they have well-established limitations when attempting to describe behaviors or understand related psychological impacts (Baumeister et al, 2007;Doliński, 2018;Hinds & Joinson, 2019;Sassenberg & Ditrich, 2019). Single duration estimates are unable to capture the range of experiences provided by modern technology and survey instruments poorly correlate with a variety of objectively measured behaviors (Boase & Ling, 2013;Ellis et al, 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Open-source smartphone app and tools for measuring, quantifying, and visualizing technology use

et al. 2021

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Psychological science has spent many years attempting to understand the impact of new technology on people and society. However, the frequent use of self-report methods to quantify patterns of usage struggle to capture subtle nuances of human–computer interaction. This has become particularly problematic for devices like smartphones that are used frequently and for a variety of purposes. While commercial apps can provide an element of objectivity, these are ‘closed’ and cannot be adapted to deliver a researcher-focused ‘open’ platform that allows for straightforward replication. Therefore, we have developed an Android app that provides accurate, highly detailed, and customizable accounts of smartphone usage without compromising participants’ privacy. Further recommendations and code are provided to assist with data analysis. All source code, materials, and data are freely available (see links in supplementary materials section).

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Open-source smartphone app and tools for measuring, quantifying, and visualizing technology use

et al. 2021

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“…To formally analyze the architecture of the Android permission system, an abstract model has been proposed. Formalizing the Android system provides a more precise level of evolution [32]. Furthermore, it underlines the differences between the features of the Android versions.…”

Section: Android Permission System Components and Formal Modelingmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Comprehensive Analysis of the Android Permissions System

Almomani

Alkhayer

2020

IEEE Access

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Android is one of the most essential and highly used operating systems. Android permissions system is a core security component that offers an access-control mechanism to protect system resources and users' privacy. As such, it has experienced continuous change over each Android release. However, previous research on the permissions system has employed static analysis techniques. Furthermore, most of these studies are outdated, covering older versions of Android. This paper aims to discuss the permissions system intensively to provide a nutshell overview of the Android platform's access-control mechanism. The paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the Android permissions system since it was introduced in 2008 until now, accompanied by a formal model of its components. The results of the analysis reveal a continuous growth in the number of permissions since the original release-a growth of seven times in some permission categories. A case study has been conducted for the last five years' versions of the top Android apps to examine the permissions system's evolution and its attendant security issues from the applications' perspective. Some apps showed an increase in permissions usage of 73.33% by the 2020 release. Additionally, the results of the case study contribute to the understanding of permissions deployment by both vendors and developers. Finally, a discussion of the permission-based security enhancements discloses that the Android permissions system faces various security issues. In general, this paper provides researchers and academics an up-to-date, comprehensive, self-contained reference study of the Android permissions system.

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“…An Android application is somewhat seen as a collection of activities with different types that interact with the user through a back stack. ASM has recently been extended in [30] to capture all the core elements of the multi-tasking mechanism used in inter-component communication.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Smali+: An Operational Semantics for Low-Level Code Generated from Reverse Engineering Android Applications

et al. 2020

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Today, Android accounts for more than 80% of the global market share. Such a high rate makes Android applications an important topic that raises serious questions about its security, privacy, misbehavior and correctness. Application code analysis is obviously the most appropriate and natural means to address these issues. However, no analysis could be led with confidence in the absence of a solid formal foundation. In this paper, we propose a full-fledged formal approach to build the operational semantics of a given Android application by reverse-engineering its assembler-type code, called Smali. We call the new formal language Smali + . Its semantics consist of two parts. The first one models a single-threaded program, in which a set of main instructions is presented. The second one presents the semantics of a multi-threaded program which is an important feature in Android that has been glossed over in the-state-of-the-art works. All multi-threading essentials such as scheduling, threads communication and synchronization are considered in these semantics. The resulting semantics, forming Smali + , are intended to provide a formal basis for developing security enforcement, analysis and misbehaving detection techniques for Android applications.

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Android Multitasking Mechanism: Formal Semantics and Static Analysis of Apps

Cited by 5 publications

References 15 publications

Open-source smartphone app and tools for measuring, quantifying, and visualizing technology use

Open-source smartphone app and tools for measuring, quantifying, and visualizing technology use

A Comprehensive Analysis of the Android Permissions System

Smali+: An Operational Semantics for Low-Level Code Generated from Reverse Engineering Android Applications

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