一句话：AutoDebloater 自动探索并展示 Activity 转换图，让用户选择并移除不需要的 Activity，以精简 Android 应用。
Android 应用功能日益膨胀，但用户并不需要全部功能；冗余功能会扩大攻击面并增加存储与内存开销。终端用户难以全面探索应用以识别可删除功能，且缺少自助精简工具。作者提出 AutoDebloater：一个浏览器可访问的 Web 应用，可自动探索目标应用并识别 Activity 间转换，构建 Activity Transition Graph（ATG）呈现给用户；用户选择不需保留的 Activity 后，工具自动将其移除。作者在来自 Google Play 与 F-Droid 的 Finance、Tools、Navigation 三类共五个 Android 应用上开展用户研究。结果表明，用户对精简应用的稳定性以及工具发现此前未注意功能的能力感到满意。
Android applications are getting bigger with an increasing number of features. However, not all the features are needed by a specific user. The unnecessary features can increase the attack surface and cost additional resources (e.g., storage and memory). Therefore, it is important to remove unnecessary features from Android applications. However, it is difficult for the end users to fully explore the apps to identify the unnecessary features, and there is no off-the-shelf tool available to assist users to debloat the apps by themselves. In this work, we propose AutoDebloater to debloat Android applications automatically for end users. AutoDebloater is a web application that can be accessed by end-users through a web browser. In particular, AutoDebloater can automatically explore an app and identify the transitions between activities. Then, AutoDebloater will present the Activity Transition Graph to users and ask them to select the activities they do not want to keep. Finally, AutoDebloater will remove the activities that are selected by users from the app. We conducted a user study on five Android apps downloaded from three categories (i.e., Finance, Tools, and Navigation) in Google Play and F-Droid. The results show that users are satisfied with AutoDebloater in terms of the stability of the debloated apps and the ability of AutoDebloater to identify features that are never noticed before. The tool is available at http://autodebloater.club. The code is available at https://github.com/jiakun-liu/autodebloater/ and the demonstration video can be found at https://youtu.be/Gmz0-p2n9D4.
@inproceedings{LiuHTMTGL23,
title = {AutoDebloater: Automated Android App Debloating},
author = {Jiakun Liu and Xing Hu and Ferdian Thung and Shahar Maoz and Eran Toch and Debin Gao and David Lo},
booktitle = {ASE},
year = {2023},
doi = {10.1109/ase56229.2023.00017}
}