Detecting illegally-copied apps on android devices

Abstract

As the copyright for apps in smartphones is not protected properly, a number of illegally-copied apps are widely used. This gives rises to the degradation of the app market's transparency and reliability. In this paper, we propose a method detecting illegally-copied apps on the Android devices in order to solve the aforementioned problem. The illegally-copied app detector allows the user not to know whether it is running and offers a concealment function, which the user can't access or remove forcibly from outside. In addition, the proposed detector uses signature-based forensic marking techniques, which determines whether the app is illegally copied or not. The illegally-copied app detector can effectively prevent the use of the illegally-copied app installed or stored in internal/external memory on Android Devices. © 2013 IEEE.