Testing of Memory Leak in Android Applications

Android applications run on mobile devices that have limited memory resources. Although Android has its own memory manager with garbage collection support, many applications currently suffer from memory leak vulnerabilities. These applications may crash due to out of memory error while running. Testing of memory leak can detect the vulnerability early. In this paper, we perform memory leak testing of Android applications. We first develop some common memory leak patterns specific to Android applications. Then, based on the patterns, we generate test cases to emulate the memory leak. We evaluated the proposed testing approach (denoted as fuzz testing) for a number of Android applications. The initial results indicate that the proposed testing approach can effectively discover memory leaks in applications. Further, implemented code often lacks exception handling mechanism for altered resources and failed invocation of memory management related API calls.