Underground economy of android application plagiarism

Abstract

As Android became the most popular mobile operating system, malicious activities targeting Android and its applications are rising rapidly. While technical approaches may mitigate the attacks with varying effectiveness, understanding the economic incentives of the criminals may shed light on the most effective defense. In this talk, I will focus on application plagiarism on Android markets. First, I will describe the unique characteristics of android applications, the fundamental differences between plagiarism of Android applications and that of non-mobile software, and the relationship between plagiarism and mobile advertising. Next, I will illustrate the challenges in measuring the scale, severity, and impact of Android application plagiarism. To achieve this, we need not only detect plagiarism among the large number of applications on different Android markets but also measure their usage and impact on advertising on a large, live network. I will describe how we correlated plagiarized applications detected through static analysis to their advertising traffic captured on a live network. I will characterize properties of the cloned applications, including their distribution across different markets, application categories, and advertising libraries. To examine how plagiarized applications affect the original developers, I will estimate on the advertising revenue and user base that plagiarized applications have siphoned from the original developers. Finally, I will discuss defenses against application plagiarism.