GlassWing: A Tailored Static Analysis Approach for Flutter Android Apps

The variety of mobile operating systems available in the market has led to the emergence of cross-platform frameworks, which simplify the development and deployment of mobile applications across multiple platforms simultaneously. Among these, the Flutter framework promoted by Google has become a widely used cross-platform development framework. To date, no work has provided support for the static analysis of Flutter apps on the Android platform. State-of-the-art static analyzers fail to "see" the implicit invocation between the Dart language used by the Flutter framework and the Dalvik bytecode (DEX) used by the native Android platform, posing a significant threat to the completeness of the mobile software analysis.In this paper, we present GlassWing, the first tailored approach to static analysis for Flutter Android apps. GlassWing leverages a data-flow-oriented approach to conduct key program semantic extraction of Flutter apps and discloses the implicit Dart-DEX invocation relations, thereby making cross-language invocation visible. Extensive evaluation on 1,023 popular real-world Flutter apps indicates that GlassWing enhances static analysis of Flutter apps integrated with Soot by parsing 141% more Jimple code lines, extending the call graph with more edges and nodes, and revealing almost 3X potential sensitive data leaks that were previously undetected with FlowDroid. GlassWing sheds light on downstream research fields for Flutter apps (e.g., program graph analysis, taint analysis, and malicious software analysis). Many current and future Android analysis initiatives can be enhanced by seamlessly incorporating GlassWing’s insights.