Resolving reflection methods in Android applications

Abstract

Although reflection methods in Android can facilitate developing applications, they will block control flow and data flow in static analysis, making its precision decreased. To solve this problem, we trigger applications to execute reflection methods and record its reflection targets at runtime. Reflection targets may be a method invocation, field setting or instantiating of some classes. Considering many static analysis' input is apk file, we further transform reflection methods in apk into explicit method invocation, field setting and class initiating according to the recorded reflection targets. Our experiment result shows that, based on our method, some static analysis can perform better on these transformed apk and produce more precise results.