학술논문

Checking App Behavior Against App Descriptions: What If There are No App Descriptions?
Document Type
Conference
Source
2021 IEEE/ACM 29th International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC) ICPC Program Comprehension (ICPC), 2021 IEEE/ACM 29th International Conference on. :422-432 May, 2021
Subject
Computing and Processing
Scalability
Reverse engineering
XML
Prototypes
Tools
Mobile applications
Reliability
Mobile App Classification
Replication
Negative Results
Reverse Engineering
Topic Modelling
Language
ISSN
2643-7171
Abstract
Classifying mobile apps based on their description is beneficial for several purposes. However, many app descriptions do not reflect app functionalities, whether accidentally or on purpose. Most importantly, these app classification methods do not work if the app description is unavailable. This paper investigates a Reverse Engineering-based Approach to Classify mobile apps using The data that exists in the app, called REACT. To validate the proposed REACT method, we use a large set of Android apps (24,652 apps in total). We also show REACTs’ extendibility for malware/anomaly detection and prove its reliability and scalability. However, our analysis shows some limitations in REACT procedure and implementation, especially for similar feature based app grouping. We discuss the root cause of these failures, our key lessons learned, and some future enhancement ideas. We also share our REACT tools and reproduced datasets for the app market analyst, mobile app developers and software engineering research communities for further research purposes.