A study of network domains used in android applications

Abstract

Numerous Android applications use the Internet to share and exchange data. Such data can range from posting simple status updates to private sensitive information such as the users’ location or business contacts. Popular Android applications from Google Play have been identified leaking private data to remote third party servers. Existing works focuses on protecting sensitive information from leaving the smartphone, or detecting which applications leak information based on API calls or the permission requests in their Manifest file. In this work, we propose to leverage the combination of static analysis and dynamic analysis to understand ultimately the network domain to which the Android applications are interacting. Network graphs are constructed and demonstrate implicitly the relation of application developers and the network domains used in the applications.