Scalable Statement Oracle Violation Detection for Android applications

MPhil Thesis Defence


Title: "Scalable Statement Oracle Violation Detection for Android applications"

By

Mr. Bin XU


Abstract

Statement oracle violation stands for the error caused by illegal value 
usages in a particular statement. In Android application, detecting 
statement oracle violations is challenging because particular event 
sequences are always needed to trigger them, which are hard to find since 
Android applications have huge numbers of possible event sequences.

We propose a scalable targeted approach to detecting statement oracle 
violations using symbolic analysis. We provide a sound symbolic modeling 
of error conditions prescribing all the possible event sequences with 
bounded length. To achieve high scalability, we model the symbolic 
analysis using dynamic programming to significantly reduce the size of 
constraints. We implemented and evaluated our approach on eight real world 
applications. The experiment results show that our approach can detect 
statement oracle violations effectively and efficiently. Our 
quantification of the size of the constraints and the corresponding 
analysis time show that our approach achieves high scalability.


Date:			Monday, 6 January 2014

Time:			2:00pm – 4:00pm

Venue:			Room 3501
 			Lifts 25/26

Committee Members:	Dr. Charles Zhang (Supervisor)
 			Prof. Shing-Chi Cheung (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Sunghun Kim


**** ALL are Welcome ****