Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

12-2014

Abstract

Application plagiarism or application cloning is an emerging threat in mobile application markets. It reduces profits of original developers and sometimes even harms the security and privacy of users. In this paper, we introduce a new concept, called camouflaged applications, where external features of mobile applications, such as icons, screenshots, application names or descriptions, are copied. We then propose a scalable detection framework, which can find these suspiciously similar camouflaged applications. To accomplish this, we apply text-based retrieval methods and content-based image retrieval methods in our framework. Our framework is implemented and tested with 30,625 Android applications from the official Google Play market. The experiment results show that even the official market is comprised of 477 potential camouflaged victims, which cover 1.56 % of tested samples. Our paper highlights that these camouflaged applications not only expose potential security threats but also degrade qualities of mobile application markets. Our paper also analyze the behaviors of detected camouflaged applications and calculate the false alarm rates of the proposed framework.

Keywords

Camouflaged applications, Application plagiarism, Cloning

Discipline

Information Security

Research Areas

Cybersecurity

Publication

Information Security and Cryptology ICISC 2014: 17th International Conference, Seoul, South Korea, December 3-5, Revised Selected Papers

Volume

8949

First Page

241

Last Page

254

ISBN

9783319159423

Identifier

10.1007/978-3-319-15943-0_15

Publisher

Springer

City or Country

Cham

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15943-0_15

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