<scp>HapFlow</scp> : The Taint Analysis Framework for OpenHarmony Apps

With the rapid growth of OpenHarmony, a new distributed operating system (OS), security and privacy issues have become major concerns. While taint analysis has proven effective in Android, OpenHarmony still lacks a comparable framework. Additionally, OpenHarmony's programming language, ArkTS, has several unique features compared to other languages like TypeScript and Java, including complex lifecycles, closure mechanisms, and a distinct API ecosystem. Directly adapting existing taint analysis tools for Android cannot achieve effectiveness in OpenHarmony applications. To address this challenge, we propose HapFlow , a novel taint analysis framework tailored specifically for the OpenHarmony platform and ArkTS programs. This work presents: (1) an LLM-assisted method for identifying and categorizing source APIs for OpenHarmony, (2) a lifecycle and callback functions modeling approach that supports declarative UI in ArkTS, and (3) an IFDS-based taint propagation extension that accurately handles closure-induced cross-function data flows in OpenHarmony applications. Therefore, HapFlow enables precise inter-procedural data-flow analysis for OpenHarmony applications. We validate HapFlow 's effectiveness on the HapBench benchmark, achieving 96.15% precision and 94.34% recall. Furthermore, HapFlow identifies 73 sensitive data leak flows across over 3,000 open-source projects with 8 false positives, completing over 98% of analyses within 10 seconds. These results demonstrate HapFlow 's practicability and scalability for taint analysis in OpenHarmony applications.

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Publication Details

Journal
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology
Published
2026-02-24
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1145/3793863
Primary Topic
Advanced Malware Detection Techniques
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00
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article

HapFlow : The Taint Analysis Framework for OpenHarmony Apps

Mingyi Zhou, Haonan Chen, Lei Li, Yulin Zhao
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology
Advanced Malware Detection Techniques
article

HapFlow : The Taint Analysis Framework for OpenHarmony Apps

Mingyi Zhou, Haonan Chen, Lei Li, Yulin Zhao
article en

Abstract

With the rapid growth of OpenHarmony, a new distributed operating system (OS), security and privacy issues have become major concerns. While taint analysis has proven effective in Android, OpenHarmony still lacks a comparable framework. Additionally, OpenHarmony's programming language, ArkTS, has several unique features compared to other languages like TypeScript and Java, including complex lifecycles, closure mechanisms, and a distinct API ecosystem. Directly adapting existing taint analysis tools for Android cannot achieve effectiveness in OpenHarmony applications. To address this challenge, we propose HapFlow , a novel taint analysis framework tailored specifically for the OpenHarmony platform and ArkTS programs. This work presents: (1) an LLM-assisted method for identifying and categorizing source APIs for OpenHarmony, (2) a lifecycle and callback functions modeling approach that supports declarative UI in ArkTS, and (3) an IFDS-based taint propagation extension that accurately handles closure-induced cross-function data flows in OpenHarmony applications. Therefore, HapFlow enables precise inter-procedural data-flow analysis for OpenHarmony applications. We validate HapFlow 's effectiveness on the HapBench benchmark, achieving 96.15% precision and 94.34% recall. Furthermore, HapFlow identifies 73 sensitive data leak flows across over 3,000 open-source projects with 8 false positives, completing over 98% of analyses within 10 seconds. These results demonstrate HapFlow 's practicability and scalability for taint analysis in OpenHarmony applications.

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology
Huazhong University of Science and Technology (CN), Beihang University (CN)
Openalex Percentile: Top 46%
Advanced Malware Detection Techniques
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