ReuNify: A Step Towards Whole Program Analysis for React Native Android Apps

TL;DR

ReuNify is a tool that integrates JavaScript and native code in React Native Android apps into a unified analysis framework, significantly improving static analysis coverage and privacy leak detection.

Contribution

ReuNify introduces a novel approach to combine JavaScript and native code into an intermediate language for comprehensive static analysis of React Native apps.

Findings

70% increase in code coverage using Soot with ReuNify

84% increase in callgraph nodes reached

Detection of two additional privacy leaks on average

Abstract

React Native is a widely-used open-source framework that facilitates the development of cross-platform mobile apps. The framework enables JavaScript code to interact with native-side code, such as Objective-C/Swift for iOS and Java/Kotlin for Android, via a communication mechanism provided by React Native. However, previous research and tools have overlooked this mechanism, resulting in incomplete analysis of React Native app code. To address this limitation, we have developed REUNIFY, a prototype tool that integrates the JavaScript and native-side code of React Native apps into an intermediate language that can be processed by the Soot static analysis framework. By doing so, REUNIFY enables the generation of a comprehensive model of the app's behavior. Our evaluation indicates that, by leveraging REUNIFY, the Soot-based framework can improve its coverage of static analysis for the 1,007 most popular React Native Android apps, augmenting the number of lines of Jimple code by 70%. Additionally, we observed an average increase of 84% in new nodes reached in the callgraph for these apps, after integrating REUNIFY. When REUNIFY is used for taint flow analysis, an average of two additional privacy leaks were identified. Overall, our results demonstrate that REUNIFY significantly enhances the Soot-based framework's capability to analyze React Native Android apps.