InsDal: A safe and extensible instrumentation tool on Dalvik byte-code for Android applications

Program instrumentation is a widely used technique in dynamic analysis and testing, which makes use of probe code inserted to the target program to monitor its behaviors, or log runtime information for off-line analysis. There are a number of automatic tools for instrumentation on the source or byte code of Java programs. However, few works address this issue on the register-based Dalvik byte-code of ever-increasing Android apps. This paper presents a lightweight tool, InsDal, for inserting instructions to specific points of the Dalvik byte-code according to the requirements of users. It carefully manages the registers to protect the behavior of original code from illegal manipulation, and optimizes the inserted code to avoid memory waste and unnecessary overhead. This tool is easy to use and has been applied to several scenarios (e.g. energy analysis, code coverage analysis). A demo video of our tool can be found at the website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fpw-aygZ3kE.