Investigation of Security-related Commits in Android Apps

Abstract

The exponential increase in smartphone usage has fueled the rapid growth of Android applications (apps). Unfortunately, this growth has also resulted in an alarming rise in security vulnerabilities, posing a significant challenge for developers of smartphone apps. In this paper, we conducted a quantitative and qualitative study to analyze security-related issues in open-source Android apps available on GitHub. Our study included a total set of 689 security-related commits identified from 111,224 commits distributed over 2,187 apps. We proposed a taxonomy of ten distinct categories of security issues, which we identified using the card-sorting technique. Our findings showed that Permission issues were the most prevalent in our dataset (370, 53.7%), followed by Login issues (160, 23.22%). Issues such as Privacy (5, 0.72%) and Framework (3, 0.43%) were rare in our dataset. These preliminary findings serve as an initial step towards comprehending the primary security concerns from the perspective of both developers and researchers.