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.

Index Terms

• Security and privacy

  • Systems security

    • Operating systems security

• Social and professional topics

  • Computing / technology policy

    • Computer crime