Reputation Based Security Model for Android Applications

Abstract

The market for smart phones has been booming in the past few years. There are now over 400,000 applications on the Android market. Over 10 billion Android applications have been downloaded from the Android market. Due to the Android popularity, there are now a large number of malicious vendors targeting the platform. Many honest end users are being successfully hacked on a regular basis. In this work, a cloud based reputation security model has been proposed as a solution which greatly mitigates the malicious attacks targeting the Android market. Our security solution takes advantage of the fact that each application in the android platform is assigned a unique user id (UID). Our solution stores the reputation of Android applications in an anti-malware providers' cloud (AM Cloud). The experimental results witness that the proposed model could well identify the reputation index of a given application and hence its potential of being risky or not.