University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Debugging Strategy and Debug Tools for Statistically Translated Binaries on Mobile Platforms

Wu, Shengzhao

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/47204

Description

Title
Debugging Strategy and Debug Tools for Statistically Translated Binaries on Mobile Platforms
Author(s)
Wu, Shengzhao
Contributor(s)
Hwu, Wen-Mei W.
Issue Date
2012-05
Keyword(s)
  • Android applications
  • debugging
  • static binary translation
  • mobile computing
Abstract
The Android platform Google is one of the most popular mobile platforms which has a large number of users. Currently, most of the Android mobile devices are based on the ARM architecture. While most Android application packages, or APKs, are based on Java and can also run on Android devices based on the MIPS and X86 architectures, a significant portion of these Android applications also contain native ARM machine code and can only run on the ARM architecture. In order to run ARM-specific APKs on the MIPS platform, a static binary translator is being developed. During the development, a systematic way of debugging translated Android APKs is needed for development to troubleshoot the translator. Since the input ARM APKs are generally applications from the Android market which have no source code available and have all debugging information stripped, there is currently not easy way to figure out the real problem of misbehaving translated applications. In my thesis, I will discuss the strategies we used to debug translated Android application and demonstrate our tool to generate automatic traces from both original ARM APK and translated MIPS APK. Our debugging strategy and debugging tool has made it feasible for developers to track down the possible bugs and relieve them from the burden of reading disassembled binary from ARM-specific applications.
Type of Resource
text
Language
en
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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/47204

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