Race detection for Android applications

Abstract

Programming environments for smartphones expose a concurrency model that combines multi-threading and asynchronous eventbased dispatch. While this enables the development of efficient and feature-rich applications, unforeseen thread interleavings coupled with non-deterministic reorderings of asynchronous tasks can lead to subtle concurrency errors in the applications.In this paper, we formalize the concurrency semantics of the Android programming model. We further define the happens-before relation for Android applications, and develop a dynamic race detection technique based on this relation. Our relation generalizes the so far independently studied happens-before relations for multithreaded programs and single-threaded event-driven programs. Additionally, our race detection technique uses a model of the Android runtime environment to reduce false positives.We have implemented a tool called DROIDRACER. It generates execution traces by systematically testing Android applications and detects data races by computing the happens-before relation on the traces. We analyzed 15 Android applications including popular applications such as Facebook, Twitter and K-9 Mail. Our results indicate that data races are prevalent in Android applications, and that DROIDRACER is an effective tool to identify data races.

Systematic execution of Android test suites in adverse conditions

“…Errors in event-driven apps may also be caused by unexpected nondeterministic ordering of events, as studied in recent work on race detection [12,23]. Such techniques require manual investigation to identify the harmful races and tend to produce many false positives.…”

“…As a supplement or alternative to manually written test suites, many automated testing techniques have been created aiming to find bugs with little or no help from the developer [3,4,6,7,12,13,14,22,23,25,27,29]. The primary advantage of such techniques is that they can, in principle, explore the state space more extensively, including the unusual event sequences.…”

An automated framework to support testing for process‐level race conditions

“…For instance, we may leverage the approaches used in CHESS and CONTEST to ensure exhaustive interleavings of processes. Work by Maiya et al considers asynchronous event dispatch in addition to thread interleaving as a way to reduce false positives for race detection in Android applications. Similarly, SIMEXPLORER also considers event dispatch based on signals and system calls to distinguish real races from potential races.…”

Sherlock: scalable deadlock detection for concurrent programs

“…Penelope doesn't use concolic execution. Recent papers [51,33,40] show how to detect data races in event-driven and reactive programs; their techniques might also be useful for deadlock detection in such programs.…”