Automatic Construction of Callback Model for Android Application

Abstract

The heavy use of event-callback mechanism in frameworks like Android causes challenges for static analysis. Modelling of callback mechanisms for Android applications (app for short) is becoming a major method to address such challenges. In this work, we aim to construct a generic callback-related model that supports path-sensitive analysis. We consider three unresolved challenges in the existing modelling approaches: 1) building connections between different components; 2) identifying path-sensitive conditions; 3) handling the system-driven callbacks and fine-grained lifecycle callbacks. We propose algorithms for constructing a generic path-sensitive callback model and present a prototype model constructor, AndroChecker, to validate our approach. We evaluate 20 real-world apps using AndroChecker. The evaluation result shows that our method and tool have a strong capability in modelling path conditions and inter-component invocations.