Detection of Privacy Information Leakage for Android Applications by Analyzing API Inter-Dependency and the Shortest Distance

Dorae Kim, Yongsu Park

http://doi.org/

In general, the benign apps transmit privacy information to the external to provide service to users as the malicious app does. In other words, the behavior of benign apps is similar to the one of malicious apps. Thus, the benign app can be easily manipulated for malicious purposes. Therefore, the malicious apps as well as the benign apps should notify the users of the possibility of privacy information leakage before installation to prevent the potential malicious behavior. In this paper, We propose the method to detect leakage of privacy information on the android app by analyzing API inter-dependency and shortest distance. Also, we present LeakDroid which detects leakage of privacy information on Android with the above method. Unlike dynamic approaches, LeakDroid analyzes Android apps on market site. To verify the privacy information leakage detection of LeakDroid, we experimented the well-known 250 malicious apps and the 1700 benign apps collected from Android Third party market. Our evaluation result shows that LeakDroid reached detection rate of 96.4% in the malicious apps and detected 68 true privacy information leakages inside the 1700 benign apps.