13 lines
1.2 KiB
XML
13 lines
1.2 KiB
XML
== Threat to validity <sec:cl-ttv>
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During the analysis of the ART internals, we made the hypothesis that its different operating modes are equivalent: we analyzed the loading process for classes stored as non-optimized `.dex` format, and not for the pre-compiled `.oat`.
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It is a reasonable hypothesis to suppose that the two implementations have been produced from the same algorithm using two compilation workflows.
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Similarly, we assumed that the platform classes stored in `boot.art` are the same as the ones in `BOOTCLASSPATH`.
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We confirm empirically our hypothesis on an Android Emulator, but we may have missed some edge cases.
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The comparison of Smali code can lead to underestimated values, for example, if the compilation process performs minor modifications such as instruction reordering.
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The ratios reported in this study for the comparison of code are thus a lower bound and would be higher with a more precise comparison.
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In addition, platform classes are stored differently in older versions of Android and could not be easily retrieved.
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For this reason, we did not compared the classes found in applications to their versions older than SDK 32 to avoid producing unreliable statistics for those versions.
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