DroidFuzzer: Fuzzing the Android Apps with Intent-Filter Tag

Abstract

The Android system is getting more and more popular on the mobile devices. Thus, lots of apps have sprung up to facilitate people's daily life. However, many of the apps are released without sufficient testing work, so the users encounter a sudden app crash now and then. This will undoubtedly impact the user's experience and even lead to economic loss. Because current testing tools on Android apps mainly focus on the motion event on the screen, like click event, bugs concerned with data handling module in an app is neglected. In this paper, we propose an automated testing method to fuzz testing the Android apps. The test targets are the Activities which accept outside MIME data. These Activities are picked out by analyzing the Intent-filter tag in the AndroidManifest.xml file. An automated fuzzing tool, DroidFuzzer, is implemented based on the method. Finally, experiments are conducted to prove the effectiveness of it.