Security Issues in Android Application Development and Plug-in for Android Studio to Support Secure Programming

To mitigate the risk of attacks to mobile applications, it is important for mobile application developers to develop secure mobile applications. There have been tools that statically analyze the mobile applications to determine whether there are data leakage or access control vulnerabilities The Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Melon University published CERT Java secure coding rules applicable to developing android applications. This paper describes SACH (Secure Android Coding Helper) - a tool we implemented to help developers identify security vulnerabilities in Android application. The tool analyzes Android application source code to detect violations of CERT Java secure coding rules. This tool will help Android developers to write Android code that comply with CERT Java secure coding rules. It can also be used in the classroom to teach students about Android secure coding.

In software testing process, test data generation represents an important step for high quality software, even for mobile devices. As proposed in previous works, a potential source for random data generation is represented by the UI layout files that are used for almost all mobile platforms (Android, iOS, Windows Phone/Mobile). This paper continues the previous work and presents a test data generation system based on Android layout files. The test data generator uses DSL files as input and generates test data that conform to several testing principles. The generated test data could be stored in XML files or any format required by the testing frameworks.

This paper focuses on software quality assurance in android application development with focus on approaches to confirm software quality in android applications. In this work, we compare the waterfall model with agile-scrum methodologies to realize software quality assurance with special focus on mobile applications. This research allows us to answer, “Which process model and practices are available for android software development along with focus on quality assurance?” The other research focus in this paper is “How auditors, developers and testers play their defined roles to maintain quality in mobile application development?” Agility for software development has transformed into a preferred and favored method for mobile application development. The major aim of this research is to contribute for a better knowledge for mobile application development methodologies practiced by the organizations for the development of applications based on systematic literature review.

According to International Data Corporation (IDC), Android accounted for 81% of all smartphone shipments in the third quarter of 2013. With the increase in smartphones, mobile application installs from Google Play have reached more than 48 billion app installs as revealed by Sundar Pichai, senior vice president, Chrome and Apps at Google I/O 2013. Thus, Android application development has become increasingly popular with the need of an effective software solution for application development and testing. While most Android applications are developed in Java, the Android framework is quite different fromm typical Java frameworks. Thus, while development or testing of Android applications, the user needs to be aware of all the terms and concepts specific to the Android framework such as activity, views and the Android SDK in general.

Mu'allaf is a call for non-Muslims who hope to convert to Islam or inherited Islam whose faith still needs to be supported and strengthened. It is the responsibility of Muslims to give support and strength to Mu'allaf who are now considered brothers in religion, especially in the form of welfare, moral, financial, and learning assistance. When a non-Muslim has entered the religion of Islam, he must learn the ritual of prayer and perform it to the best of his ability as a person who has just learned Islam. However, interpreting these prayers with a guidebook alone is insufficient; considering that they need additional help in terms of words and actions. The Prayers Learning Application is a new method to learn prayers that are taught digitally using the portable platform of Android. Thus, the purpose of this study is to design and develop an android application for teaching prayers for the guidance of Mu’allaf. This android application includes multimedia elements to attract and help users better understand delivering prayers. The study's methodology was based on design and development research (DDR) and Waterfall Model was used as a guide in developing this android application. Adobe Animate 2021 was chosen as a development platform, using Action Script 3.0 as the programming language to develop this android application. This application consists of four modules which are Prayer Note, Prayer Time, Simply Prayer, and Prayer Videos. Three experts from a local higher education institution were appointed to evaluate this android application in terms of its functionality through content, interface, and interaction design. The data analysis is acquired in the form of frequency and percentage. Results revealed that this android application is suitable for new learners, which is the mu'allaf community to learn about prayers. In addition, this android application is expected to provide a positive impact in terms of functionality and usability in the future, especially in teaching prayers for the guidance of Mu’allaf. The application of mobile learning is indeed providing a very useful opportunity to deliver Islamic knowledge widely

A Third-Party Library(TPL) is often used in developing Android applications, however older TPLs may have vulnerabilities. Hence developers need to keep them in their applications the latest version. Nevertheless, there is a lot of applications using older TPLs. In this paper, we propose a new method which users enable to update TPLs in Android applications. An Android application and TPLs can be converted to smali file which is more of an assembly based language. A smali file can be replaced with another smali file on the same class. Our method takes advantage of its properties and exchanges a vulnerable TPL for an security fixed one. Moreover, we apply it to real applications and evaluate feasibility of it.

As of late as mechanical pace has elevated the general working economies of the cellular telephones, the innovation pattern is going towards the most extreme utilization of very solid cell phones. As the cell phone utilization is expanding step by step, individuals are expecting a ton from their cell phones by expanding dependability, security, execution along these lines numerous this sorts of characteristics. Therefore to satisfy clients prerequisites, one of the pioneers in the business sector of cell phones think of the advancement in the innovation and that pioneer is Google android Operating System (OS). Android application development is an evolving area, changing and improving constantly. It has been a concentrate in examination for the last couple of decades due to its wide potential applications and its essentialness to meet the security needs of present day's reality. Regardless, the framework is incredibly eccentric and therefore it is tricky to prepare. This paper presents an open source approach for creating an android application with thinking of some as specialized security issues.

In particular, an early integration of performance specifications in the SDP has been recognized during the last few years as an effective approach to improve the overall quality of a software. Performance related problems are becoming more and more strategic in the software development, especially recently with the advent of Web Services and related business-oriented composition techniques (software as a service, Web 2.0, orchestration, choreography, etc.). The goal of our work is the definition of a software development process that integrates performance evaluation and prediction. The software performance engineering development process (SPEDP) we specify is focused on performance, which plays a key role driving the software development process, thus implementing a performance/QoS-driven (software) development process. More specifically, in this paper our aim is to formally define the SPEDP design process, posing particular interest on the basis, on the first step of SPEDP, the software/system architecture design, modeling and/or representation. We define both the diagrams to use and show how to model the structure of the software architecture, its behavior and performance requirements. This is the first mandatory step for the automation of the SPEDP into a specific tool.

Performance related problems are becoming more and more strategic in the software development, especially recently with the advent of Web Services and related business-oriented composition techniques (software as a service, Web 2.0, orchestration, choreography, etc.). In particular, an early integration of performance specifications in the SDP has been recognized during the last few years as an effective approach to improve the overall quality of a software. The goal of our work is the definition of a software development process that integrates performance evaluation and prediction. The software performance engineering development process (SPEDP) we specify is focused on performance, which plays a key role driving the software development process, thus implementing a performance/QoS-driven (software) development process. More specifically, in this paper our aim is to formally define the SPEDP design process, posing particular interest on the basis, on the first step of SPEDP, the software/system architecture design, modeling and/or representation. We define both the diagrams to use and show how to model the structure of the software architecture, its behavior and performance requirements. This is the first mandatory step for the automation of the SPEDP into a specific tool, which we have partially implemented as a performance plug-in for ArgoUML, ArgoPerformance.

Green computing is a growing trend in computing, pursuing the goal of helping software developers to be more aware and produce energy-efficient software. This is especially relevant for battery-powered mobile applications, where a minimal energy consumption is desired to both mitigate the greenhouse effect and extend the battery lifetime. In this paper, we analyze the energy consumption and execution time of cryptographic primitives in Android devices. Our ultimate goal is to help Android application developers, especially those who are not experts in security, to choose the most energy-efficient cryptographic algorithms considering different security providers and security transformations. Information to make a tradeoff between energy and time consumption is also provided, being especially useful when the differences in energy consumption of different alternatives are not so significant. We have conducted our experiments with an energy profiling tool based on the PowerTutor application, which has been adapted to automate the energy profiling. Our results show that this type of power consumption studies is necessary, because selecting the most energy-efficient configuration depends on many factors, and some of the choices are not obvious to developers.

The low-code approach is an important area of research being developed to improve the rapid creation and performance of software applications. This approach allows developers and users to easily create software applications through an interactive interface. Existing research shows that the low-code approach accelerates the development process in innovative ways, saves effort and time, and reduces code complexity. This study analyses and compares automatic code generation and transformation techniques in low-code platforms. The study analyses the contributions of automatic code generation and transformation to software engineering processes and evaluates the impact of these techniques on software product quality and development speed. The importance of the Model-Based Development (MBD) approach in automated code generation processes is highlighted. It is stated that MBD provides benefits such as speeding up the software development process and reducing errors by enabling automatic code generation from high-level abstract models. In the study, various literature studies were evaluated to examine the impact of automatic code generation and transformation techniques on the application development process. These studies have shown how automatic code generation and transformation techniques are applied, what results are achieved and what contributions these techniques make to the software development process. The results of the study show that automatic code generation and transformation techniques have a great impact on the application development process. In particular, the acceleration of the software development process, the reduction of errors and the ability to produce more effective and efficient software products are important benefits of these techniques. In addition, it has been found that this approach increases the success of software projects by enabling software developers to produce fast and accurate solutions in complex systems. In this context, the importance of automatic code generation and transformation techniques plays an important role in software development processes.

In this paper, a novel self-punishment based scheduling algorithm for a cooperative real- time content download application is designed. In the proposed protocol, selfish mobile devices autonomously form cooperative groups. For each formed group, the base station transmits the content to a selected mobile device designated as seed. Then, the seed shares the content with other mobile devices called sinks over device-to-device links. After analyzing the proposed protocol using a repeated game, new self-punishment mechanisms by revocation or by decreasing the bit rate, are proposed. Such self-punishment mechanisms enable the mobile devices in each cooperative group to autonomously punish selfish seeds without requiring any help from other mobile devices outside cooperative group. ‌Based on the proposed self-punishment mechanisms, a fair algorithm is designed to schedule the seeds in each cooperative group. Then, the designed scheduling algorithm is implemented using an Android application that is developed using Java in the Android Development Tool Bundle. The developed Android application does not depend on the operation system of mobile devices. Simulation results demonstrate that, on the average, the proposed protocol improves the energy efficiency of mobile devices to download real-time content of around 42 % compared to a traditional multicast scenario. Moreover, the proposed protocol does not let the energy efficiency of mobile devices degrade more than 11 %, on average, from the optimal solution even when all the mobile devises are selfish. The practical results show that the maximum difference in the run time of a real- time video over real-world smartphone screens is less than 500 milliseconds when the smartphones form a cooperative group using the developed Android application.

This scientific article presents the results of a study focused on the current practices and future prospects of AI-tools usage, specifically large language models (LLMs), in software development (SD) processes within European IT companies. The Pan-European study covers 35 SD teams from all regions of Europe and consists of three sections: the first section explores the current adoption of AI-tools in software production, the second section addresses common challenges in LLMs implementation, and the third section provides a forecast of the tech future in AI-tools development for SD. The study reveals that AI-tools, particularly LLMs, have gained popularity and approbation in European IT companies for tasks related to software design and construction, coding, and software documentation. However, their usage for business and system analysis remains limited. Nevertheless, challenges such as resource constraints and organizational resistance are evident. The article also highlights the potential of AI-tools in the software development process, such as automating routine operations, speeding up work processes, and enhancing software product excellence. Moreover, the research examines the transformation of IT paradigms driven by AI-tools, leading to changes in the skill sets of software developers. Although the impact of LLMs on the software development industry is perceived as modest, experts anticipate significant changes in the next 10 years, including AI-tools integration into advanced IDEs, software project management systems, and product management tools. Ethical concerns about data ownership, information security and legal aspects of AI-tools usage are also discussed, with experts emphasizing the need for legal formalization and regulation in the AI domain. Overall, the study highlights the growing importance and potential of AI-tools in software development, as well as the need for careful consideration of challenges and ethical implications to fully leverage their benefits.

Many papers proposed in the software engineering and information systems literature are dedicated to analysis of software projects missing their schedules, exceeding their budgets, delivering software products with poor quality and in some cases even wrong functionality. The expression “software crisis“ has been coined since the late 60's to illustrate this phenomenon. Various solutions has been proposed by academics and practitioners in order to deal with the software crisis, counter these trends and improve productivity and software quality. Such solutions recommend software process improvement as the best way to build software products needed by modern organizations. Among the well-known solutions, many are based either on software development tools or on software development approaches, methods, processes, and notations. Nevertheless, the scope of these solutions seems to be limited and the improvements they provide are often not significant. We think that since software artifacts are accumulation of knowledge owned by organizational stakeholders, the software crisis is due to a knowledge gap resulting from the discrepancy between the knowledge integrated in software systems and the knowledge owned by organizational actors. In particular, integrating knowledge management in software development process permits reducing the knowledge gap through building software products which reflect at least partly the organization's know-how. In this paper, we propose a framework which provides a definition of knowledge based on information systems architecture and describes a knowledge-oriented software development process to help organizations in reducing the software crisis impacts.

Recently, with the purpose of helping developers reduce the needed effort to build highly secure software, researchers have proposed a number of vulnerable source code prediction models that are built on different kinds of features. Identifying security vulnerabilities along with differentiating non-vulnerable from a vulnerable code is not an easy task. Commonly, security vulnerabilities remain dormant until they are exploited. Software metrics have been widely used to predict and indicate several quality characteristics about software, but the question at hand is whether they can recognize vulnerable code from non-vulnerable ones. In this work, we conduct a study on static code metrics, their interdependency, and their relationship with security vulnerabilities in Android applications. The aim of the study is to understand: (i) the correlation between static software metrics; (ii) the ability of these metrics to predict security vulnerabilities, and (iii) which are the most informative and discriminative metrics that allow identifying vulnerable units of code.