Driving Execution of Target Paths in Android Applications with (a) CAR
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dynamic program analysis is commonly used to vet Android applications. One approach is targeted execution, in which interesting or suspicious code is specifically targeted and analyzed dynamically. However, faithful execution to just the paths that reach these targets can be difficult due to the dependencies they have on other parts of the application. Prior works that handle dependencies must favor either soundness or completeness to the detriment of the other. Techniques that rely on precise dependency tracking ultimately result in lower coverage of targets due to overhead. Meanwhile, other techniques that aim for completeness by ignoring or bypassing dependencies lead to unsound execution and false positives. In this paper, we treat dependencies through the lens of a path context, which represents the program state expected by the path as it is executing. We propose an approach that provides better completeness and low false positives using Context Approximation and Refinement (CAR), which combines static constraint analysis and dynamic error recovery to infer a context based on the desired path flow and refine it during execution. We show that the integration of CAR with targeted execution can reach 3.1x more target locations in popular Android applications than the existing state of the art while having a false detection rate of 9%, enabling more complete analysis and detection of security-sensitive behaviors.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".