Understanding the security management of global third-party Android marketplaces

Abstract

As an open platform, Android enables the introduction of a variety of third-party marketplaces in which developers can provide mo- bile apps that are not provided in the official marketplace. Since the initial release of Android OS in 2008, many third-party app marketplaces have been launched all over the world. e diversity of which leads us to the following research question: are these third- party marketplaces securely managed? is work aims to answer this question through a large-scale empirical study. We collected more than 4.7 million Android apps from 27 third-party market- places, including ones that had not previously been studied in the research community, and analyzed them to study their security measures. Based on the results, we also a empt to quantify the security index of these marketplaces.