Detecting repackaged smartphone applications in third-party android marketplaces

Recent years have witnessed incredible popularity and adoption of smartphones and mobile devices, which is accompanied by large amount and wide variety of feature-rich smartphone applications. These smartphone applications (or apps), typically organized in different application marketplaces, can be conveniently browsed by mobile users and then simply clicked to install on a variety of mobile devices. In practice, besides the official marketplaces from platform vendors (e.g., Google and Apple), a number of third-party alternative marketplaces have also been created to host thousands of apps (e.g., to meet regional or localization needs). To maintain and foster a hygienic smartphone app ecosystem, there is a need for each third-party marketplace to offer quality apps to mobile users. In this paper, we perform a systematic study on six popular Android-based third-party marketplaces. Among them, we find a common “in-the-wild” practice of repackaging legitimate apps (from the offici...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: CODASPY
• Authors: Wu Zhou, Yajin Zhou, Xuxian Jiang, Peng Ning
• Keywords: CODASPY 2012, Measurement System, Measurement Techniques, Platform Vendors, Security Privacy