Investigation into Google Play security mechanisms via experimental botnet

Abstract

Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets have become a common part of human society of the 21st century and their popularity is continuously growing. However, certain research papers imply that popularity and security do not reach the same level. They suggest that there are security weaknesses allowing publishing applications with malicious behavior on Google Play. For test reasons of Google Play security mechanisms, a special pair of applications has been developed. The former is a testing application containing a mobile botnet client. It has been designed to be resistant against security scans based on dynamic analysis but its malicious intentions have been presented in uncovered form into the code of application. Such testing application has been published on Google Play. The latter is represented by a malware application with the sole purpose of being fraudulently installed on mobile devices without any security verification including Google Play. Certain interesting results have been raised by the research. Based on these results, useful future research directions to security of mobile device field have emerged. © 2015 IEEE.