ICCBot
Jiwei Yan, Shixin Zhang, Yepang Liu, Jun Yan, Jian Zhang
Abstract
For GUI programs, like Android apps, the program functionalities are encapsulated in a set of basic components, each of which represents an independent function module. When interacting with an app, users are actually operating a set of components. The transitions among components, which are supported by the Android Inter-Component Communication (ICC) mechanism, can reflect the skeleton of an app. To effectively resolve the source and destination of an ICC message, both the correct entry-point identification and the precise data value tracking of ICC fields are required. However, with the wide usage of Android fragment components, the entry-point analysis usually terminates at an inner fragment but not its host component. Also, the simply tracked ICC field values may become inaccurate when data is transferred among multiple methods. In this paper, we design a practical ICC resolution tool ICCBot, which resolves the component transitions that are connected by fragments to help the entry-point identification. Besides, it performs context-sensitive inter-procedural analysis to precisely obtain the ICC-carried data values. Compared with the state-of-the-art tools, ICCBot achieves both a higher success rate and accuracy. ICCBot is open-sourced at https://github.com/hanada31/ICCBot. A video demonstration of it is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zcoMBtGiLY.