Frontmatter

Frontmatter is a context-sensitive static analysis tool which extracts UI hierarchies and app's behavior from Android applications.

Building Frontmatter

Building and running Frontmatter requires Java version 11 or greater and Gradle version >= 6.0 (6.8.3 used).
At first, install and patch necessary dependencies by running ./gradle installDependencies in the project's root directory.
Next, build Frontmatter by running ./gradle build in the project's root directory.
To get a fat jar, which can be run standalone, run ./gradle shadowJar.

Running Frontmatter

When the build completes, there should be a runnable jar file frontmatter-1.0.93-SNAPSHOT.jar located in ./build/libs. Executing java -jar frontmatter-1.0.93-SNAPSHOT.jar --help will print out all available flags and options.

UI analysis

UI hierarchies can be mined with the following command:
java -Xmx40g -Xss4m -jar frontmatter-1.0.93-SNAPSHOT.jar ui-analysis -i sample.apk -u ./results/ui/sample.json

API calls

Program behavior, i.e. API calls from UI elements, can be collected with:
java -Xmx40g -Xss4m -jar frontmatter-1.0.93-SNAPSHOT.jar api-analysis -i sample.apk -u ./results/ui/sample.json -a ./results/api/sample.json Note that the result of UI analysis (./results/ui/sample.json) should exist.

Processing apps in bulk

frontmatter_luigi folder contains scripts to run Frontmatter analysis in parallel on a big corpus of apks. They can be also used to download and process apps from Androzoo.

Parsing results into a table representation

parsers folder contains scripts to parse UI hierarchies into a flat representation. Use parse_ui_to_widgets.py to collect data of particular widgets and parse_ui_to_activity.py to get the content of whole activities:
python parse_ui_to_widgets.py -d ./results/ui -a ../results/api --ui widgets.csv --api apis.csv -p -s stats.json
Run 'python parse_ui_to_widgets.py --help for additional params.