AdRob: examining the landscape and impact of android application plagiarism

ABSTRACT

Malicious activities involving Android applications are rising rapidly. As prior work on cyber-crimes suggests, we need to understand the economic incentives of the criminals to design the most effective defenses. In this paper, we investigate application plagiarism on Android markets at a large scale. We take the first step to characterize plagiarized applications and estimate their impact on the original application developers. We first crawled 265,359 free applications from 17 Android markets around the world and ran a tool to identify similar applications ("clones"). Based on the data, we examined properties of the cloned applications, including their distribution across different markets, application categories, and ad libraries. Next, we examined how cloned applications affect the original developers. We captured HTTP advertising traffic generated by mobile applications at a tier-1 US cellular carrier for 12 days. To associate each Android application with its advertising traffic, we extracted a unique advertising identifier (called the client ID) from both the applications and the network traces. We estimate a lower bound on the advertising revenue that cloned applications siphon from the original developers, and the user base that cloned applications divert from the original applications. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first large scale study on the characteristics of cloned mobile applications and their impact on the original developers.

References

1. A. Andoni and P. Indyk. Near-optimal hashing algorithms for approximate nearest neighbor in high dimensions". In: Foundations of Computer Science, 2006. FOCS'06. 47th Annual IEEE Symposium on. Ieee. 2006, pp. 459--468.
2. Jason Ankeny. Feds seize Android app marketplaces Applanet, AppBucket in piracy sting. Aug. 22, 2012. url: http://www.fiercemobilecontent.com/story/feds-seize-android-app-marketplaces-applanet-appbucket-piracy-sting/2012-08-22.
3. AppBrain. Android Ad networks. Mar. 2013. url: http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/ad.
4. AppBrain. Number of available android applications. Nov. 2012. url: http://www.appbrain.com/stats/number-of-android-apps.
5. Brut.alll. Android-Apktool. url: http://code.google.com/p/android-apktool.
6. J. Crussell, C. Gibler, and H. Chen. Attack of the Clones: Detecting Cloned Applications on Android Markets". In: Computer Security--ESORICS 2012 (2012), pp. 37--54.
7. N. Daswani et al. Online advertising fraud". In: Crimeware: Understanding New Attacks and Defenses (2008).
8. M. Dietz, S. Shekhar, Y. Pisetsky, A. Shu, and D.S. Wallach. \Quire: lightweight provenance for smart phone operating systems". In: USENIX Security. 2011.
9. William Enck, Landon P. Cox, and Jaeyeon Jung. TaintDroid: An Information-Flow Tracking System for Realtime Privacy Monitoring on Smartphones". In: (2010).
10. Jesus Freke. Smali/Baksmali. url: http://code.google.com/p/smali.
11. Mona Gandhi, Markus Jakobsson, and Jacob Ratkiewicz. \Badvertisements: Stealthy click-fraud with unwitting accessories". In: Online Fraud, Part I Journal of Digital Forensic Practice, Volume 1, Special Issue 2. 2006.
12. M.C. Grace, W. Zhou, X. Jiang, and A.R. Sadeghi. Unsafe exposure analysis of mobile in-app advertisements". In: Proceedings of the fifth ACM conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks. ACM. 2012, pp. 101--112.
13. T. Holz, M. Engelberth, and F. Freiling. Learning more about the underground economy: A case-study of keyloggers and dropzones". In: Computer Security--ESORICS 2009 (2009), pp. 1--18.
14. Chris Kanich et al. Show Me the Money: Characterizing Spam-advertised Revenue". In: USENIX Security Symposium. San Francisco, CA, Aug. 2011.
15. Keystore and Aliases - is there a use to multiple aliases? Dec. 2012. url: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2667399/keystore-and-aliases-is-there-a-use-to-multiple-aliases.
16. Eric Lafortune. Proguard. url: http://proguard.sourceforge.net.
17. Kirill Levchenko et al. Click Trajectories: End-to-End Analysis of the Spam Value Chain". In: IEEE Symposium and Security and Privacy. Oakland, CA, May 2011.
18. H. Liu, C.N. Chuah, H. Zang, and S. Gatmir-motahari. Evolving Landscape of Cellular Network Traffic". In: Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN), 2012 21st International Conference on. IEEE. 2012, pp. 1--7.
19. Multiple Signatures and Shared UIDs. Dec. 2012. url: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/android-security-discuss/LyyEWyFg5xc.
20. P. Pearce, A.P. Felt, G. Nunez, and D. Wagner. AdDroid: Privilege Separation for Applications and Advertisers in Android". In: Proceedings of the 7th ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security. ACM. 2012.
21. Security Alert: Malware Found Targeting Custom ROMs (jSMSHider). Dec. 2012. url: https://blog.lookout.com/blog/2011/06/15/security-alert-malware-found-targeting-custom-roms-jsmshider/.
22. S. Shekhar, M. Dietz, and D.S. Wallach. Adsplit: Separating smartphone advertising from applications". In: CoRR, abs/1202.4030 (2012).
23. Signing Your Applications. Dec. 2012. url: http://developer.android.com/tools/publishing/app-signing.html.
24. R. Stevens, C. Gibler, J. Crussell, J. Erickson, and H. Chen. Investigating User Privacy in Android Ad Libraries". In: IEEE Mobile Security Technologies (MoST), San Francisco, CA (2012).
25. B. Stone-Gross, T. Holz, G. Stringhini, and G. Vigna. The underground economy of spam: A botmasters perspective of coordinating large-scale spam campaigns". In: USENIX Workshop on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats (LEET). 2011.
26. B. Stone-Gross et al. The underground economy of fake antivirus software". In: Economics of Information Security and Privacy III (2011), pp. 55--78.
27. B. Stone-Gross et al. Understanding fraudulent activities in online ad exchanges". In: Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement conference. ACM. 2011, pp. 279--294.
28. W. Zhou, Y. Zhou, X. Jiang, and P. Ning. Detecting repackaged smartphone applications in third-party android marketplaces". In: Proceedings of the second ACM conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy. ACM. 2012, pp. 317--326.
29. Y. Zhou and X. Jiang. Dissecting android malware: Characterization and evolution". In: Security and Privacy (SP), 2012 IEEE Symposium on. IEEE. 2012, pp. 95--109.

Index Terms

• Social and professional topics

  • Computing / technology policy

    • Computer crime