Non-Essential Communication in Mobile Applications
Name
MIT-CSAIL-TR-2015-015.pdf
Size
1.91 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
e6d6d948d06818770199afd703f36bca
Download all files submitted through automated deposit
Author(s)
Rubin, Julia
Gordon, Michael I.
Nguyen, Nguyen
Rinard, Martin
Advisor(s)
Martin Rinard
Date Issued
May 4, 2015
Series/Report no.
MIT-CSAIL-TR-2015-015
Abstract
This paper studies communication patterns in mobile applications. Our analysis shows that 65% of the HTTP, socket, and RPC communication in top-popular Android applications from Google Play have no effect on the user-observable application functionality. We present a static analysis that is able to detect non-essential communication with 84%-90% precision and 63%-64% recall, depending on whether advertisement content is interpreted as essential or not. We use our technique to analyze the 500 top-popular Android applications from Google Play and determine that more than 80% of the connection statements in these applications are non-essential.
Persistent DSpace Link
