"We are taking one step towards solving this problem."Īpp clones, according to the researchers, meet two essential criteria. "It is a very difficult problem for people to deal with," Liu said.
According to a recent study, the researchers reported in their paper, 14 percent of the advertising revenue and 10 percent of the user base for a developer are diverted to app clones on average.
In addition, legitimate developers lose their revenue and users to app clones. The most common types of malware are aimed at aggressive advertisements and stealing private information such as Social Security numbers, passwords, and credit card data. While Google Play inspects all new apps for possible clones, sophisticated attackers can easily evade that screening process.Īpp clones bring a number of severe problems for users and software developers, Liu and Chen said. Clones are frequently used as carriers for smartphone malware, Liu said, as studies have reported that about 86 percent of malware samples are app clones with malicious payloads. After cloning an app, attackers would upload it to the same market (e.g. Specifically, some attackers go to app stores like Google Play, where they search for popular apps, clone the code, and assemble them with "purpose-added" functionalities or modifications after reverse-engineering those apps.
Chen said that millions of app users are currently using app clones. "App users, software developers and app market managers will all benefit."Īccording to Liu, the rapidly increasing use of smartphones has enabled some cyber attackers to benefit by cloning popular smartphone apps while embedding malicious code into the clones. "Three types of people will benefit from our research," Chen said. Chen recently presented the paper at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) in Hyderabad, South India. The system is described in the paper, "Achieving Accuracy and Scalability Simultaneously in Detecting Application Clones on Android Markets," which was written by Liu Kai Chen, a researcher at the State Key Laboratory of Information Security, Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China and Yingjun Zhang, a researcher at the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Liu and his collaborators designed and implemented the app clone detection system and evaluated it on five Android markets. "This tool enables the app market to quickly analyze a very large number of apps within hours," said Liu, director of the Center for Cyber-Security, Information Privacy, and Trust (LIONS Center).
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