Effectively Manifesting Concurrency Bugs in Android Apps

Qiwei Li, Yanyan Jiang, Tianxiao Gu, Chang Xu, Jun Ma, Xiaoxing Ma, Jian Lu

Abstract: Smartphones are indispensable in people's daily lives. As smartphone apps are being increasingly concurrent, developers are increasingly unable to tackle the complexity and to avoid subtle concurrency bugs. To better address this issue, we propose a novel approach to manifesting concurrency bugs in Android apps based on the fact that one can simultaneously generate input events and their schedules for an app. We conduct static-dynamic hybrid analysis to find potentially conflicting resource accesses in an app. The app is then automatically pressure-tested by guided event and schedule generation. We implemented the prototype tool AATT and evaluated it over thirteen popular real-world open-source apps. AATT successfully found 9 concurrency bugs out of which 7 were previously unknown.