A Framework for Third Party Android Marketplaces to Identify Repackaged Apps

App security on third party Android marketplaces has been one of the most serious concerns in Android ecosystem. Without screening and integrity evaluation on uploaded Apps like the App publishing process done by Google Play market, there might exist many malicious Apps in third party Android markets. Malicious Apps can leak sensitive user information and personal data, steal user identity and conduct financial frauds accordingly. As the easiest way to generate a malicious App is to modify a released App and repackage it, therefore, how to detect repackaged Apps has become an interesting research topic. For third party Android markets to eliminate or mitigate repackaged Apps uploaded into markets, a framework based on App fingerprint and whitelist/blacklist of Apps is proposed to evaluate the integrity of an App before it is released on the market in this paper. A framework prototype, called as Secure Market, is implemented and evaluated through various test scenarios. Our evaluation results have shown that the proposed framework detected 96% of repackaged Apps in average.

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