DELTA: Data Extraction and Logging Tool for Android

TL;DR

This paper introduces DELTA, a flexible and efficient Android data logging tool that enhances existing solutions, with minimal impact on device performance, supporting research in user behavior and system analysis.

Contribution

The paper presents DELTA, a novel Android logging tool that improves flexibility, extensibility, and feature set over existing solutions, with thorough performance evaluation.

Findings

DELTA has low system performance impact

DELTA consumes minimal battery power

DELTA maintains user experience quality

Abstract

In the past few years, the use of smartphones has increased exponentially, and so have the capabilities of such devices. Together with an increase in raw processing power, modern smartphones are equipped with a wide variety of sensors and expose an extensive set of API (Accessible Programming Interface). These capabilities allow us to extract a wide spectrum of data that ranges from information about the environment (e.g., position, orientation) to user habits (e.g., which apps she uses and when), as well as about the status of the operating system itself (e.g., memory, network adapters). This data can be extremely valuable in many research fields such as user authentication, intrusion detection and detection of information leaks. For these reasons, researchers need to use a solid and reliable logging tool to collect data from mobile devices. In this paper, we first survey the existing logging tools available on the Android platform, comparing the features offered by different tools and their impact on the system, and highlighting some of their shortcomings. Then, we present DELTA - Data Extraction and Logging Tool for Android, which improves the existing Android logging solutions in terms of flexibility, fine-grained tuning capabilities, extensibility, and available set of logging features. We performed a full implementation of DELTA and we run a thorough evaluation on its performance. The results show that our tool has low impact on the performance of the system, on battery consumption, and on user experience. Finally, we make the DELTA source code and toolset available to the research community.