Towards a threat assessment framework for apps collusion

Abstract

App collusion refers to two or more apps working together to achieve a malicious goal that they otherwise would not be able to achieve individually. The permissions based security model of Android does not address this threat as it is rather limited to mitigating risks of individual apps. This paper presents a technique for quantifying the collusion threat, essentially the first step towards assessing the collusion risk. The proposed method is useful in finding the collusion candidate of interest which is critical given the high volume of Android apps available. We present our empirical analysis using a classified corpus of over 29,000 Android apps provided by Intel SecurityTM