CSR: Small: Collaborative Research: Taming Mobile Hardware & OS Diversity for Comprehensive Software Analysis

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Today, the Android operating system running on mobile systems such as smartphones, tablets, and wearables, is increasingly diverse. This is mainly because Android is heavily customized at multiple layers by many different vendors and mobile carriers, for various reasons including the difference in hardware and brand-specific value-added applications and services. This diversity of Android creates important challenges for testing, debugging, and analysis of software running on these mobile systems, including testing for consistent functionality and performance across different systems, finding crash bugs, analyzing malware, and identifying security vulnerabilities. The goal of this project is to make testing and analysis of the entire software stack of mobile systems running Android faster and more affordable, while at the same time requiring small engineering effort, all despite the diversity of mobile software and hardware. The proposed project will help improve the quality and security of software on mobile systems - a significant benefit to society and the economy. The plan to achieve the aforementioned goals through a cloud-based mobile farm service, which provides virtual mobile instances, or virtual instances for short. Each virtual instance is a virtual machine that runs on powerful servers and that fully resembles the hardware and software configurations of a particular mobile system. By leveraging virtual machines running in servers, the proposed solution will provide a low cost, thus lower prices for the users. The important challenges will be addressed in two research thrusts. The first thrust investigates techniques to consolidate the real mobile systems in the cloud to reduce the overall infrastructure cost. The second research thrust targets at enhancing the performance of virtual instances by leveraging software and hardware techniques such as speculation, record and replay, dynamic boundary, and Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA).