Versatile yet lightweight record-and-replay for Android

Recording and replaying the execution of smartphone apps is useful in a variety of contexts, from reproducing bugs to profiling and testing. Achieving effective record-andreplay is a balancing act between accuracy and overhead. On smartphones, the act is particularly complicated, because smartphone apps receive a high-bandwidth stream of input (e.g., network, GPS, camera, microphone, touchscreen) and concurrency events, but the stream has to be recorded and replayed with minimal overhead, to avoid interfering with app execution. Prior record-and-replay approaches have focused on replaying machine instructions or system calls, which is not a good fit on smartphones. We propose a novel, stream-oriented record-and-replay approach which achieves high-accuracy and low-overhead by aiming at a sweet spot: recording and replaying sensor and network input, event schedules, and inter-app communication via intents. To demonstrate the versatility of our approach, we have constructed a tool name...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: OOPSLA
• Authors: Yongjian Hu, Tanzirul Azim, Iulian Neamtiu
• Keywords: OOPSLA 2015, Security Privacy