An_App_to_Log_Location_Mining_Apps_in_An.pdf

location mining

1. An App to Log Location Mining
Apps in Android Appliances
By
Nazir Ahmad Dar
1
[[email protected]]

Afaq Alam Khan
2

1
ApTech (ILM Infinity), Parraypora Srinagar
2
Department of IT, Central University of Kashmir
Venue:

Department of Electronics
and Instrumentation
Technology,
University of Kashmir,
Srinagar, Kashmir, J&K,
India, 190006
UGC Sponsored National Seminar on

Electronic Devices, Systems and Information Security
18-19 March 2016
[email protected]
ISBN(Print) 978-93-82288-6 ; page – 48
Copyright and peer review Lies with University of Kashmir, Srinagar

2. Android is undoubtedly the most widely used operating system for mobile phones and
tablets. Its market share is high as compared to other mobile operating systems even
higher than iOS. Such a huge base of users makes Android an ideal target for malwares.
There has been a rapid increase in the number of malware attacks. Even though
malware detection is one of the major concerns in mobile computing but data mining
intrusive apps are emerging as a major challenge nowadays. Such apps can be more
dangerous to users than malwares. Mobile phones do store sensitive data and leakage of
this information can be risky. Geo-located data is valuable and snooping on geo-location
is one of the primary tasks of malicious apps. Android provides a passive security
mechanism to publish apps on play-store. Therefore, it is not proving to be much
effective in case of data leakage. This paper proposes an app which constructs logs of
apps which mine location of a device. The app inspects on Manifest files, Intents, app
description and the network traffic statistics of an app. This lets the users know which
app is mining its location. Hence, a user can check the maliciousness of an app.
Besides, a learning algorithm can be applied to the logs generated for the malware
detection purpose.

3. Apps needlessly mining personal data of the user on the
device. One in four apps doing this.
Data often sold to third party marketers.
Data leakage may pose some risks both social as well as
professional.
Geo-Located data most valuable for advertisers.
Most intrusive apps mining geo-located data.
74% of smartphone users use LBS

Nazir Ahmad Dar
SEEDS –2016
An App to Log Location Mining Apps in Android SEEDS- 2016

4. Android’s security model combines the standard
Linux OS features that control the security at the
process level and the permission based mechanism.
no application, by default, has permission to
perform any operations that would adversely impact
other applications, the operating system, or the
user.

Nazir Ahmad Dar
SEEDS –2016
An App to Log Location Mining Apps in Android SEEDS- 2016

5. Applications must share resources and data explicitly.
Done by declaring the permissions they need for
additional capabilities.
Permissions are mentioned in the application Manifest
file.
At the time of app installation the user is asked the list
of permissions for the resources to be used.
For LBS permissions are “ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION”
and “ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION”.


Nazir Ahmad Dar
SEEDS –2016
An App to Log Location Mining Apps in Android SEEDS- 2016

6. The system proposed displays a list of apps
which mine location of a device along with
the network traffic statistics of it.
The apps also stores the retrieved
information in a log.


Nazir Ahmad Dar
SEEDS –2016
An App to Log Location Mining Apps in Android SEEDS- 2016

7. Nazir Ahmad Dar
SEEDS –2016
An App to Log Location Mining Apps in Android SEEDS- 2016
Decompiler
Reference
Engine
(Comparator,
Statistics
Retriever)
Log
APK
Mainfest
.xml
Retrieved
Information
Fig 1 : Architecture of Proposed App

8. An App consist of manifest file, application programs
for Dalvik virtual machine (VM), and application
resources.
To extract Manifest file “Manifest.xml” from the
“apk” of an app and check for the permissions of
location access, intents and the app description.
If an app is found to be location aware then this info
with network traffic statistics are also added to the
log.


Nazir Ahmad Dar
SEEDS –2016
An App to Log Location Mining Apps in Android SEEDS- 2016

9. Nazir Ahmad Dar
SEEDS –2016
An App to Log Location Mining Apps in Android SEEDS- 2016
App Name
LBS
Permissions
Intents
(with Google
Maps)
‘Location’
mentioned in
Description
Network
Traffic
Whatsapp Yes Yes No 34 MB
Temple
RunOZ
Yes No No 10.4 MB
Bottle Shoot Yes No No 410 KB
TalkingTom
Cat
Yes No No 4 MB
Flashlight Yes No No 1 MB
Asphalt
Nitro
Yes No No 1.2 MB
Google Maps Yes No Yes 17 MB
Table 1 : Observation of some Apps