Sweetening android lemon markets: measuring and combating malware in application marketplaces

Timothy M. Vidas, Nicolas Christin
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引用次数: 58

Abstract

Application marketplaces are the main software distribution mechanism for modern mobile devices but are also emerging as a viable alternative to brick-and-mortar stores for personal computers. While most application marketplaces require applications to be cryptographically signed by their developers, in Android marketplaces, self-signed certificates are common, thereby offering very limited authentication properties. As a result, there have been reports of malware being distributed through application "repackaging". We provide a quantitative assessment of this phenomenon by collecting 41,057 applications from 194 alternative Android application markets in October 2011, in addition to a sample of 35,423 applications from the official Android market, Google Play. We observe that certain alternative markets almost exclusively distribute repackaged applications containing malware. To remedy this situation we propose a simple verification protocol, and discuss a proof-of-concept implementation, AppIntegrity. AppIntegrity strengthens the authentication properties offered in application marketplaces, thereby making it more difficult for miscreants to repackage apps, while presenting very little computational or communication overhead, and being deployable without requiring significant changes to the Android platform.
甜蜜的安卓柠檬市场:测量和打击恶意软件在应用程序市场
应用程序市场是现代移动设备的主要软件分发机制,但也正在成为个人电脑实体商店的可行替代方案。虽然大多数应用程序市场要求开发人员对应用程序进行加密签名,但在Android市场中,自签名证书很常见,因此提供的身份验证属性非常有限。因此,有报道称恶意软件通过应用程序“重新包装”进行分发。我们在2011年10月从194个Android应用市场中收集了41,057个应用,以及从Android官方市场Google Play中收集的35,423个应用,对这一现象进行了定量评估。我们观察到,某些替代市场几乎只分发包含恶意软件的重新包装的应用程序。为了纠正这种情况,我们提出了一个简单的验证协议,并讨论了一个概念验证实现,AppIntegrity。AppIntegrity增强了应用程序市场中提供的认证属性,从而使不法分子更难以重新打包应用程序,同时提供很少的计算或通信开销,并且无需对Android平台进行重大更改即可部署。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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