Extending EcoAndroid with Automated Detection of Resource Leaks

Abstract

When developing mobile applications, developers often have to decide when to acquire and when to release resources. This leads to resource leaks, a kind of bug where a resource is acquired but never released. This is a common problem in Android applications that can degrade energy efficiency and, in some cases, can cause resources to not function properly. In this paper, we present an extension of EcoAndroid, an Android Studio plugin that improves the energy efficiency of Android applications, with an inter-procedural static analysis that detects resource leaks. Our analysis is implemented using Soot, FlowDroid, and Heros, which provide a static-analysis environment capable of processing Android applications and performing inter-procedural analysis with the IFDS framework. It currently supports the detection of leaks related to four Android resources: Cursor, SQLiteDatabase, Wakelock, and Camera. We evaluated our tool with the DroidLeaks benchmark and compared it with 8 other resource leak detectors. We obtained a precision of 72.5% and a recall of 83.2%. Our tool was able to uncover 191 previously unidentified leaks in this benchmark. These results show that our analysis can help developers identify resource leaks.

Alexandra Mendes

Assistant Professor

My research focuses on encouraging a wider adoption of software verification by creating tools and methods that hide the complexities of verifying software. Recently, I started work on usable security, in particular on the impact of formal verification on the use and adoption of formally verified security software products. Much of my most recent work overlaps with the area of software engineering. For more details, see selected publications and some of my projects. Follow me on Twitter or add me on LinkedIn.