PermDroid: Automatically testing permission-related behaviour of Android applications

Abstract

The Android runtime permission model allows users to grant and revoke permissions at runtime. To verify the robustness of apps, developers have to test the apps repeatedly under a wide range of permission combinations, which is time-consuming and unsuited for regression testing. Existing app testing techniques are of limited help in this context, as they seldom consider different permission combinations explicitly. To address this issue, we present PermDroid to automatically test the permission-related behaviour of apps with permissions granted/revoked dynamically. PermDroid first statically constructs a state transition graph (STG) for the app; it then utilizes the STG for the permission-directed exploration to test permission-related behaviour only under the combinations of the relevant permissions. The experimental results on 50 real-world Android apps demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of PermDroid: the average permission-related API invocation coverage achieves 72.38% in 10 minutes, and seven permission-related bugs are uncovered, six of which are not detected by the competitors.