Automated Repair of Resource Leaks in Android Applications
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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 PlumbDroid: a technique to automatically detect and fix resource leaks in Android applications. PlumbDroid uses static analysis to find execution traces that may leak a resource. The information built for detection also undergirds 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 DroidLeaks curated collection demonstrates that PlumbDroid's approach is scalable and produces correct fixes for a variety of resource leak bugs. This indicates it can provide valuable support to enhance the quality of Android applications in practice.
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