Practical static analysis of context leaks in Android applications

Abstract

Summary Android native applications, written in Java and distributed in APK format, are widely used in mobile devices. Their specific pattern of use lets the operating system control the creation and destruction of resources, such as activities and services (contexts). Programmers are not supposed to interfere with such life cycle events. Otherwise, contexts might be leaked, ie, they will never be deallocated from memory, or be deallocated late, leading to memory exhaustion and frozen applications. In practice, it is easy to write incorrect code, which hinders garbage collection of contexts and leads to context leakages. In this work, we present a novel static analysis method that finds context leaks in Android code. We apply this analysis to APKs translated into Java bytecode. We provide a formal analysis of our algorithms and suggest further research directions for improving precision by combining different approaches. We discuss the results of a large number of experiments with our analysis, which reveal context leaks in many widely used applications from the Android marketplace. This shows the practical usefulness of our technique and its superiority w.r.t. the well‐known Lint and Infer static analysis tools. We estimate the amount of memory saved by the collection of the leaks found and explain, experimentally, where programmers often go wrong and limitations of our tool. Such lessons could be used for designing of a sound or more powerful static analysis tool. This work can be considered as a practical application of software analysis techniques to solve practical problems.

Do Memories Haunt You? An Automated Black Box Testing Approach for Detecting Memory Leaks in Android Apps

“…The latter finding is coherent with the experimental results obtained by Toffalini et al [14], who found potential causes of memory leaks via static analysis in the majority of the applications they downloaded from Google Play. Moreover, our results are coherent with the ones reported in [16], which found memory leaks related to Activity classes in 37 out of the 99 tested Android apps in an experiment carried out in 2017.…”

“…13 For comparing two heap dump files we exploited the Eclipse Memory Analyzer Tool (MAT). 14 MAT is widely used by Android developers [25] and is integrated in other memory leaks detection tools such as Android Studio Memory Profiler [28], Leak Canary [23] and LeakDAF [16].…”

“…Memory leaks are one of the main causes of software aging [12] and performance degradation in Android apps [13], [14]. A memory leak is a type of resource leak [15] that occurs when a computer program incorrectly manages memory allocations in such a way that memory which is no longer needed is not released.…”

“…Memory leaks impact a considerable number of real Android apps, as it has been shown in the recent work by Toffalini et al [14], and therefore a number of solutions to detect them have been proposed in the literature. Since memory leaks are usually due to bad programming practices that negatively impact the app's memory usage, several source code static analysis approaches have been proposed in the literature to detect possible root causes of Android memory leaks [15], [19]- [22].…”

“…A key limitation of these approaches is that they focus only on subsets of bad practices. Moreover, they may report a considerable number of false positives [14].…”