Towards an understanding of the impact of advertising on data leaks
by Veelasha Moonsamy; Moutaz Alazab; Lynn Batten
International Journal of Security and Networks (IJSN), Vol. 7, No. 3, 2012

Abstract: Recent investigations have determined that many Android applications in both official and non-official online markets expose details of the user's mobile phone without user consent. In this paper, for the first time in the research literature, we provide a full investigation of why such applications leak, how they leak and where the data is leaked to. In order to achieve this, we employ a combination of static and dynamic analysis based on examination of Java classes and application behaviour for a data set of 123 samples, all pre-determined as being free from malicious software. Despite the fact that anti-virus vendor software did not flag any of these samples as malware, approximately 10% of them are shown to leak data about the mobile phone to a third-party; applications from the official market appear to be just as susceptible to such leaks as applications from the non-official markets.

Online publication date: Sun, 10-Mar-2013

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