AutoDebloater: Automated android app debloating

• Main Authors: LIU, Jiakun, HU, Xing, Ferdian, Thung, MAOZ, Shahar, TOCH, Eran, GAO, Debin, LO, David
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2023
• Subjects: Android (operating system); Software debloating; HTTP; Information Security
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/8385; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/9388/viewcontent/ase_23.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Android applications are getting bigger with an increasing number of features. However, not all the features are needed by a specific user. The unnecessary features can increase the attack surface and cost additional resources (e.g., storage and memory). Therefore, it is important to remove unnecessary features from Android applications. However, it is difficult for the end users to fully explore the apps to identify the unnecessary features, and there is no off-the-shelf tool available to assist users to debloat the apps by themselves. In this work, we propose AutoDebloater to debloat Android applications automatically for end users. AutoDebloater is a web application that can be accessed by end-users through a web browser. In particular, AutoDebloater can automatically explore an app and identify the transitions between activities. Then, AutoDebloater will present the Activity Transition Graph to users and ask them to select the activities they do not want to keep. Finally, AutoDebloater will remove the activities that are selected by users from the app. We conducted a user study on five Android apps downloaded from three categories (i.e., Finance, Tools, and Navigation) in Google Play and F-Droid. The results show that users are satisfied with AutoDebloater in terms of the stability of the debloated apps and the ability of AutoDebloater to identify features that are never noticed before. The tool is available at http://autodebloater.club. The code is available at https://github.com/jiakun-liu/autodebloater/ and the demonstration video can be found at https://youtu.be/Gmz0-p2n9D4