Android App Merging for Benchmark Speed-Up and Analysis Lift-Up

Abstract

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.