Automated repair of resource leaks in Android applications

Abstract

Resource leaks – a program does not release resources it previously acquired – are a common kind of bug in Android applications. Even with the help of existing techniques to automatically detect leaks, writing a leak-free program remains tricky. One of the reasons is Android’s event-driven programming model, which complicates the understanding of an application’s overall control flow. In this paper, we present ▪ : a technique to automatically detect and fix resource leaks in Android applications. ▪ builds a succinct abstraction of an app’s control flow, and uses it to find execution traces that may leak a resource. The information built during detection also enables automatically building a fix – consisting of release operations performed at appropriate locations – that removes the leak and does not otherwise affect the application’s usage of the resource. An empirical evaluation on resource leaks from the ▪ curated collection demonstrates that ▪ ’s approach is scalable, precise, and produces correct fixes for a variety of resource leak bugs: ▪ automatically found and repaired 50 leaks that affect 9 widely used resources of the Android system, including all those collected by ▪ for those resources; on average, it took just 2 min to detect and repair a leak. ▪ also compares favorably to Relda2/RelFix – the only other fully automated approach to repair Android resource leaks – since it can often detect more leaks with higher precision and producing smaller fixes. These results indicate that ▪ can provide valuable support to enhance the quality of Android applications in practice.