Permission Abusing by Ad Libraries of Smartphone Apps

摘要

The security threat caused by free apps embedded with advertising has been discussing in recent years. An app developer must insert a Software Development Kit (SDK), known as ad library (ad-lib for short), into his/her host program, and compile the entire program into an Android Package (APK) executive file. This study explores the security of mobile apps from the abuse of permission made by ad-libs. Given a tested app, the proposed system in the paper may show what the ad-lib(s) embedded in the app are, and what their attempts to abuse permissions are. The proposed system used two mechanisms, SecurityException and checkl'ermission, to catch the attempts of permission abusing from ad-lib(s).