Abstract—We developed an Application Programming
Interface (API) tracing tool for Android-based mobile devices.
This tool has the capability of generating trace files by remotely
monitoring and recording API calls made by an app running on
a mobile device. In addition, the automatic feature of the tool
allows repeated tracing tasks to be conducted without user’s
intervention against a collection of apps. The trace data may be
effectively utilized in analyzing app’s behavior and intentions,
which will prove to be useful in several application domains.
For example, this tool may be adopted in developing malware
detection techniques based upon the API call patterns,
identifying resource usages in different app components,
building the tool for visualizing the app’s behavior, and
constructing efficient mobile forensics tools, etc. Also, different
components of this tool make use of various concepts covered in
core computer science courses such as Operating Systems,
Computer Networks, Compilers, Data Structures, Algorithms,
and Security and Forensics, which makes them to be suitable
candidate for a senior capstone project. We formulated
inter-related project modules based upon the components of
this tracing tool, and will adopt them into the senior capstone
course at Bowie State University.
Index Terms—Android, API tracing, mobile security, senior
capstone project, mobile forensics.
Seonho Choi and Michael Bijou are with the Department of Computer
Science, Bowie State University, Bowie, MD 20723 USA (e-mail:
schoi@bowiestate.edu, mike.bijou@gmail.com).
Kun Sun is with the Center for Secure Information Systems, George
Mason University, Fairfax, VA 22030 USA (e-mail: ksun3@gmu.edu).
Edward Jung is with the Department of Computer Science and Software
Engineering, Southern Polytechnic State University, GA USA (e-mail:
ejung@spsu.edu).
Cite: Seonho Choi, Michael Bijou, Kun Sun, and Edward Jung, "API Tracing Tool for Android-Based Mobile Devices," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 5, no. 6, pp. 460-465, 2015.