Two Trends in Mobile Security: Financial Motives and Transitioning from Static to Dynamic Analysis

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to analyze the behavior and intent of recent types of privacy invasive Android adware. There are two recent trends in this area: more financial motives instead of ego motives, and the development of more dynamic analysis tools. This paper starts with a review of Android mobile operating system security, and also addresses the pros and cons of open source operating system security. Static analysis of malware provides high quality results and leads to a good understanding as shown in this paper. However, as malware grows in number and complexity, there have been recent efforts to automate the detection mechanisms and many of the static tasks. As Android's market share is rapidly growing around the world. Android security will be a crucial area of research for IT security professionals and their academic counterparts. The upside of the current situation is that malware is being quickly exposed, thanks to open source software development tools. This cooperation is important in curbing the widespread theft of personal information with monetary value.