A Survey of Android Security Threats and Defenses

With billions of people using smartphones and the exponential growth of smartphone apps, it is prohibitive for app marketplaces, such as Google App Store, to thoroughly verify if an app is legitimate or malicious. As a result, mobile users are left to decide for themselves whether an app is safe to use. Even worse, recent studies have shown that over 70% of apps in markets request to collect data irrelevant to the main functions of the apps, which could cause leaking of private information or inefficient use of mobile resources. It is worth mentioning that since resource management mechanism of mobile devices is different from PC machines, existing security solutions in PC malware area are not quite compatible with mobile devices. Therefore, academic researchers and commercial anti-malware companies have proposed many security mechanisms to address the security issues of the Android devices. Considering the mechanisms and techniques which are different in nature and used in proposed works, they can be classified into different categories. In this survey, we discuss the existing Android security threats and existing security enforcements solutions between 2010−2015 and try to classify works and review their functionalities. We review a few works of each class. The survey also reviews the strength and weak points of the solutions.