Abstract
This paper discusses the automation of experiments on the Android platform. The most obvious choice for such a test-bed is virtualization as it provides an easy solution to several challenges, e.g., configuration, automation, clean up. However, virtualization sometimes imposes limitations, for instance, with respect to a realistic environment. Although this paper focusses mainly on our virtual test-bed for Android (named AVP for Android Virtual Playground) it also explores a solution for a physical test-bed. Both test-beds were built with the primary concern of being able to control (as much as possible) the devices participating in the experiment. Moreover, the virtual test-bed provides a wide variety of data collection possibilities while the physical one has a leaner design allowing to perform experiments in a more ad hoc way (with the devices available in a room).
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Notes
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AVP can be used to automate the experiment flow of TaintDroid.
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Available through the ADT (Android Development Tools) environment.
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From a few seconds to a few minutes depending on the physical machine and the virtualization acceleration.
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process ID, owner ID, process Name, etc.
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The Android logging system: http://developer.android.com/tools/help/logcat.html
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Thales Canada for their help and support through this project. This work is funded by the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada through grants RDA1-447989-13 and RDA2-452896-13. We are in the process of releasing AVP as open source, for more information, contact the corresponding author frgagnon@cegep-ste-foy.qc.ca.
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Gagnon, F., Poisson, J., Frenette, S., Lafrance, F., Hallé, S., Michaud, F. (2015). Blueprints of an Automated Android Test-Bed. In: Obaidat, M., Holzinger, A., Filipe, J. (eds) E-Business and Telecommunications. ICETE 2014. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 554. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25915-4_1
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