DDLDroid: Efficiently Detecting Data Loss Issues in Android Apps

Data loss issues in Android apps triggered by activity restart or app relaunch significantly reduce the user experience and undermine the app quality. While data loss detection has received much attention, the state-of-the-art techniques still miss many data loss issues due to the inaccuracy of the static analysis or the low coverage of the dynamic exploration. To this end, we present DDLDroid, a static analysis approach and an open-source tool, to systematically and efficiently detect data loss issues based on the data flow analysis. DDLDroid is bootstrapped by a saving-restoring bipartite graph which correlates variables that need saving to the corresponding variables that need restoring according to their carrier widgets. The missed or broken saving or restoring data flows lead to data loss issues. The experimental evaluation on 66 Android apps demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach: DDLDroid successfully detects 302 true data loss issues in 73 minutes, 180 of which are previously unknown.