DroidBot

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About

DroidBot is a lightweight test input generator for Android. It can send random or scripted input events to an Android app, achieve higher test coverage more quickly, and generate a UI transition graph (UTG) after testing.

A sample UTG is shown here.

DroidBot has the following advantages as compared with other input generators:

1. It does not require system modification or app instrumentation;
2. Events are based on a GUI model (instead of random);
3. It is programmable (can customize input for certain UI);
4. It can produce UI structures and method traces for analysis.

Reference

Li, Yuanchun, et al. "DroidBot: a lightweight UI-guided test input generator for Android." In Proceedings of the 39th International Conference on Software Engineering Companion (ICSE-C '17). Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2017.

Prerequisite

1. Python (both 2 and 3 are supported)
2. Java
3. Android SDK
4. Add platform_tools directory in Android SDK to PATH
5. (Optional) OpenCV-Python if you want to run DroidBot in cv mode.

How to install

Clone this repo and install with pip:

git clone https://github.com/honeynet/droidbot.git
cd droidbot/
pip install -e .

If successfully installed, you should be able to execute droidbot -h.

How to use

1. Make sure you have:

   • .apk file path of the app you want to analyze.
   • A device or an emulator connected to your host machine via adb.

2. Start DroidBot:

   droidbot -a <path_to_apk> -o output_dir
   

   That's it! You will find much useful information, including the UTG, generated in the output dir.

   • If you are using multiple devices, you may need to use -d <device_serial> to specify the target device. The easiest way to determine a device's serial number is calling adb devices.
   • On some devices, you may need to manually turn on accessibility service for DroidBot (required by DroidBot to get current view hierarchy).
   • If you want to test a large scale of apps, you may want to add -keep_env option to avoid re-installing the test environment every time.
   • You can also use a json-format script to customize input for certain states. Here are some script samples. Simply use -script <path_to_script.json> to use DroidBot with a script.
   • If your apps do not support getting views through Accessibility (e.g., most games based on Cocos2d, Unity3d), you may find -cv option helpful.
   • You can use -humanoid option to let DroidBot communicate with Humanoid in order to generate human-like test inputs.
   • You may find other useful features in droidbot -h.

Evaluation

We have conducted several experiments to evaluate DroidBot by testing apps with DroidBot and Monkey. The results can be found at DroidBot Posts. A sample evaluation report can be found here.

Acknowledgement

1. AndroidViewClient
2. Androguard
3. The Honeynet project
4. Google Summer of Code

Useful links

• DroidBot Blog Posts
• droidbotApp Source Code
• How to contact the author