Nowadays, energy efficiency is recognized as a core quality attribute of applications (apps) running on Android-powered devices constrained by their battery. Indeed, energy hogging apps are a liability to both the end-user and software developer. Yet, there are very few tools available to help developers increase the quality of their native code by ridding it of energy-related bugs. Android Studio is the official IDE for millions of developers worldwide and there’s no better place to enforce green coding rules in everyday projects. Indeed, Android Studio provides a code scanning tool called Android lint that can be extended with lacking green checks in order to foster the design of more eco-responsible apps.
Link to Publication: http://olegoaer.perso.univ-pau.fr/works/ase19-amobile-1.pdf
In recent years, various benchmark suites have been developed to evaluate the efficacy of Android security analysis tools. The choice of such benchmark suites used in tool evaluations is often based on the availability and popularity of suites and not on their characteristics and relevance. One of the reasons for such choices is the lack of information about the characteristics and relevance of benchmark suites.
In this context, we empirically evaluated four Android-specific benchmark suites: DroidBench, Ghera, IccBench, and UBCBench. For each benchmark suite, we identified the APIs used by the suite that were discussed on Stack Overflow in the context of Android app development and measured the usage of these APIs in a sample of 227K real-world apps (coverage). We also identified security-related APIs used in real-world apps but not in any of the above benchmark suites to assess the opportunities to extend benchmark suites (gaps).
In the field of software analysis a trade-off between scalability and accuracy always exists. In this respect, Android app analysis is no exception, in particular, analyzing large or many apps can be challenging. Dealing with many small apps is a typical challenge when facing micro-benchmarks such as DROIDBENCH or ICC-BENCH. These particular benchmarks are not only used for the evaluation of novel tools but also in continuous integration pipelines of existing mature tools to maintain and guarantee a certain quality-level. Considering this latter usage it becomes very important to be able to achieve benchmark results as fast as possible. Hence, benchmarks have to be optimized for this purpose. One approach to do so is app merging. We implemented the Android Merge Tool (AMT) following this approach and show that its novel aspects can be used to produce scaled up and accurate benchmarks. For such benchmarks Android app analysis tools do not suffer from the scalability-accuracy trade-off anymore. We show this throughout detailed experiments on DROIDBENCH employing three different analysis tools (AMANDROID, ICCTA, FLOWDROID). Benchmark execution times are largely reduced without losing benchmark accuracy. Moreover, we argue why AMT is an advantageous successor of the state-of-the-art app merging tool (APKCOMBINER) in analysis lift-up scenarios.
In modern days, mobile applications (apps) have become omnipresent. Components of mobile apps (such as 3rd party libraries) require to be separated and analyzed differently for security issue detection, repackaged app detection, tumor code purification and so on. Various techniques are available to automatically analyze mobile apps. However, analysis of the app’s executable binary remains challenging due to required curated database, large codebases and obfuscation. Considering these, we focus on exploring a versatile technique to separate different components with designed based features independent of code obfuscation. Particularly, we conducted an empirical study using design patterns and fuzzy signatures to separate programming design components such as 3rd party libraries. In doing so, we have built a system for automatically extracting design patterns from both the executable package (APK) and Jar of an Android application. We have experimented the relationship and impact of design patterns in 3rd party libraries, usual apps and Android malware. The experimental outcome with various standard datasets containing obfuscated apps and malwares reveals that design features like these are present significantly within them (within 60% APKs including malware). Moreover, these features remain unaltered even after app obfuscation. Finally, as a case study, we have shown that the design patterns alone can detect 3rd party libraries within the obfuscated apps considerably (F1 score is 32%). Overall, our empirical study reveals that design features might play a versatile role in separating various Android components for various purposes.
UX (user experience) designers visually capture the UX of an app via storyboards. This method is also used in Android app development to conceptualize and design apps.
Recently, security has become an integral part of Android app UX because mobile apps are used to perform critical activities such as banking, communication, and health. Therefore, securing user information is imperative in mobile apps.
In this context, storyboarding tools offer limited capabilities to capture and reason about the security requirements of an app. Consequently, security cannot be baked into the app at design time. Hence, vulnerabilities stemming from design flaws can often occur in apps. To address this concern, in this paper, we propose a storyboard based design methodology to enable the specification and verification of security properties of an Android app at design time.
Modern software contributes to important societal decisions, and yet we know very little about its fairness properties. Can software discriminate? Evidence of software discrimination has been found in systems that recommend criminal sentences, grant access to loans and other financial products, transcribe YouTube videos, translate text, and perform facial recognition. Systems that select what ads to show users can similarly discriminate. For example, a professional social network site could, hypothetically, learn stereotypes and only advertise stereotypically female jobs to women and stereotypically male ones to men. Despite existing evidence of software bias, and significant potential for negative consequences, little technology exists to test software for such bias, to enforce lack of bias, and to learn fair models from potentially biased data. Even defining what it means for software to discriminate is a complex task. I will present recent research that defines software fairness and discrimination; develops a testing-based, causality-capturing method for measuring if and how much software discriminates and provides provable formal guarantees on software fairness; and demonstrates how framing problems as fairness-constrained contextual bandits can reduce not only bias but also impact of bias. I will also describe open problems in software fairness and how recent advances in machine learning and natural language modeling can help address them. Overall, I will argue that enabling and ensuring software fairness requires solving research challenges across computer science, including in machine learning, software and systems engineering, human-computer interaction, and theoretical computer science.
Static code analysis is widely used to support the development of secure software. It helps developers detect potential bugs and security vulnerabilities in a program’s source code without executing it. While the potential benefits of static analysis tools are beyond question, their usability is often criticised and prevents software developers from using static analysis to its full potential. In the past decade, researchers have studied developer needs and opposed them to available static analysis tool functionalities. In this paper, we summarize the main design challenges for building usable static analysis tools, and show that they revolve around the notion of explainability. We present existing analysis tools and current research in static analysis usability, and detail how they approach those challenges. This leads us to proposing potential lines of future work in explainability for static analysis, namely turning static analysis tools into assistants and teachers.
We present an editor that creates an interactive live preview for simple quadcopter missions. The preview provides instant feedback and the imperative script can be adapted through direct manipulation of the visualization. While the program is executed to draw the preview, it traces the source locations of all values. If a value is changed in the visualization, the change can be traced back to the source to produce the desired result. An application prototype demonstrates that our approach produces sensible and generalizing results even in the presence of control flow structures in our DSL.
This paper proposes Fulib-Scenarios as means to explain data modelling, GUI Mockups, and simple algorithms to non-IT people.
Intelligent software applications are becoming ubiquitous and pervasive affecting various aspects of our lives and livelihoods. At the same time, the risks to which these systems expose the organizations and end users are growing dramatically. Trustworthiness of software applications is becoming a paramount necessity. Trust is to be regarded as a first-class citizen in the total product life cycle and should be addressed across all stages of software development. Trust can be looked at from two facets: one at an algorithmic level (e.g., bias-free, discrimination-aware, explainable and interpretable techniques) and the other at a process level by making development processes more transparent, auditable, and adhering to regulations and best practices. In this paper, we address the latter and propose a blockchain enabled governance framework for building trustworthy software. Our framework supports the recording, monitoring, and analysis of various activities throughout the application development life cycle thereby bringing in transparency and auditability. It facilitates the specification of regulations and best practices and verifies for its adherence raising alerts of non-compliance and prescribes remedial measures.
Explaining reasoning and behaviour of artificial intelligent systems to human users becomes increasingly urgent, especially in the field of machine learning (ML). Many recent contributions approach that issue with post-hoc methods, meaning they consider the final system and its outcomes, while the roots of included artefacts are widely neglected. However, as ML models are inherently opaque for the human eye, specific design decisions and meta information that accrue during the development are highly relevant for explainability.
There are two main aspects shaping the position presented in this paper: First, there needs to be a stronger focus on the development of ML-based systems. To provide appropriate explanations of complex learning systems process transparency should be encouraged. Second, we suggest applying methods form the field of software provenance to improve both transparency and explainability. We already took initial steps towards the realisation of this proposal.
