Title
Security Apps under the Looking Glass: An Empirical Analysis of Android Security Apps
Abstract
Third-party security apps are an integral part of the Android app ecosystem. Many users install them as an extra layer of protection for their devices. By installing security apps, the smartphone users place a significant amount of trust on them allowing access to many smartphone resources that contain personal information such as the storage, text messages, email, and browser history. As such, it is essential to understand the mobile security apps ecosystem. In this paper, we present the first empirical study of Android security apps. We analyse 100 Android security apps from multiple aspects and offer insights to their operations and behaviours. Our results show that 20% of the security apps resell the data they collect to third parties; in some cases, even without the user consent. Also, we show that around 50% of the security apps fail to identify known malware.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1109/LCN48667.2020.9314784
2020 IEEE 45th Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN)
Keywords
DocType
ISSN
third-party security apps,Android app ecosystem,mobile security apps ecosystem,Android security apps,smartphone,malware
Conference
0742-1303
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-7281-7159-3
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Weixian Yao100.34
Yexuan Li200.34
Weiye Lin300.34
Tianhui Hu400.34
Imran Chowdhury500.34
Rahat Masood6407.94
Suranga Seneviratne715518.43