S entinel

Abstract

Due to the widespread use of Android devices and apps, it is important to develop tools and techniques to improve app quality and performance. Our work focuses on a problem related to hardware sensors on Android devices: the failure to disable unneeded sensors, which leads to sensor leaks and thus battery drain. We propose the Sentinel testing tool to uncover such leaks. The tool performs static analysis of app code and produces a model which maps GUI events to callback methods that a ect sensor behavior. The model is traversed to identify paths that are likely to exhibit sensor leaks during run-time execution. The reported paths are then used to generate test cases. The execution of each test case tracks the run-time behavior of sensors and reports observed leaks. Our experimental results indicate that Sentinel effectively detects sensor leaks, while focusing the testing efforts on a very small subset of possible GUI event sequences.