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Reverse Engineering iOS Mobile Applications

As a result of the ubiquity and popularity of smart phones, the number of third party mobile applications is explosively growing. With the increasing demands of users for new dependable applications, novel software engineering techniques and tools geared towards the mobile platform are required to support developers in their program comprehension and analysis tasks. In this paper, we propose a reverse engineering technique that automatically (1) hooks into, dynamically runs, and analyzes a given iOS mobile application, (2) exercises its user interface to cover the interaction state space and extracts information about the runtime behaviour, and (3) generates a state model of the given application, capturing the user interface states and transitions between them. Our technique is implemented in a tool called iCrawler. To evaluate our technique, we have conducted a case study using six open-source iPhone applications. The results indicate that iCrawler is capable of automatically detecting the unique states and generating a correct model of a given mobile application.