To improve speed of dynamic analysis, we take advantage
of KVM-accelerated virtualization. To use this, we use Android
images that can run on the x86 architecture. About 70% Android
applications have no native code and so can run without problem
on such targets. Other applications contain ARM native code
and cannot run on x86 architecture without proprietary library
support. We therefore excluded applications containing native
code. Despite this we believe the study results are generally
representative. Furthermore, not being able to run ARM native
code is not a fundamental limitation of our approach: thirdparty
Android emulators, e.g., Genymotion, or the use of
a dynamic ARM-to-x86 code translation library (libhoudini)
can allow running ARM code on hardware-accelerated x86
architectures [11], [12].