NDLI: Developer mistakes in writing Android manifests: an empirical study of configuration errors

Content Provider	ACM Digital Library
Author	Lee, Woo Jin Lee, Sunghee Jha, Ajay Kumar
Abstract	Each Android app must have an Android manifest file. It is one of the most important configuration files manually written by developers. In addition to various configuration parameters required to run an app, it also contains configuration parameters which are used to implement security, compatibility, and accessibility of an app. Any mistakes in writing the manifest file can cause serious implications in terms of security, reliability, and availability of an app. In this paper, we study and report different types of mistakes committed by developers in writing Android manifest files. The study was performed on 13,483 real-world Android apps. We also present an open source rule-based static analysis tool which detects developer mistakes in the manifest file. The tool generates a warning message if it detects any misconfigurations in the manifest file. We used the tool to perform the empirical study and it generated total 59,547 configuration errors in 11,110 apps. Only 2,373 apps, among studied apps, do not have any configuration errors.
Starting Page	25
Ending Page	36
Page Count	12
File Format	PDF
ISBN	9781538615447
DOI	10.1109/MSR.2017.41
Language	English
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Publisher Date	2017-05-20
Access Restriction	Subscribed
Subject Keyword	Configuration errors Rule-based error detection Android manifest Android apps
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

Sl.	Authority	Responsibilities	Communication Details
1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
2	Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	Host Institute of the Project: The host institute of the project is responsible for providing infrastructure support and hosting the project	https://www.iitkgp.ac.in
3	National Digital Library of India Office, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	The administrative and infrastructural headquarters of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in
4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
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Developer mistakes in writing Android manifests: an empirical study of configuration errors