IMGDroid: A Static Analyzer for Detecting Image Loading Defects in Android Applications

Abstract

We summarize five anti-patterns of image loading defects in Android apps, including image passing by intent, image decoding without resizing, local image loading without permission, repeated decoding without caching, and image decoding in UI thread. Based on the anti-patterns, we propose a static analyzer, IMGDroid, to automatically and effectively detect such defects. Readers can access our artifacts from GitHub and Zenodo, and can run IMGDroid to detect image loading defects in Android apps; so we are applying for Reusable and Available Badges. We implement IMGDroid in Java, and perform the experiments on a computer with Windows 10, JDK 1.8, and Android 7.1.1. Therefore, reviewers are required to be familiar with Java and proficient in using Eclipse.