An App to Log Location Mining Apps in Android Appliances

1. An App to Log Location Mining
Apps in Android Appliances
By
Nazir Ahmad Dar1 [nazir.cuk@gmail.com]
Afaq Alam Khan2
1ApTech (ILM Infinity), Parraypora Srinagar
2Department 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
nazir.cuk@gmail.com
ISBN(Print) 978-93-82288-6 ; page –
Copyright and peer review of this paper research Lies with University of
Kashmir, Srinagar
https://www.academia.edu/23521533/An_App_to_Log_Location_Mining_Apps_in_
Android_Appliances

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
NazirAhmadDarSEEDS–2016
An App to Log Location Mining Apps in Android SEEDS-2016