Analysis on Maliciousness for Mobile Applications

The rapid increase in smart phone users has enabled the application marketplace to grow dramatically. The black market presence has also grown rapidly, where paid applications are modified for free download. As a consequence, malicious applications are expected to spread with increasing frequency. In particular, the Android marketplace, where applications allowed to register without prior security checks, breeds further indiscreet distribution of malicious applications. This paper suggests a framework for detecting malicious behaviors in Android smart phone applications. The framework proposed here automatically collects applications from the official Android marketplace or from black markets, analyzes them and detects malicious behaviors. Furthermore, a pilot system was implemented based on the proposed framework, which can detect malicious applications, preventing users from any loss due to malware.