ANDRUBIS - 1,000,000 Apps Later: A View on Current Android Malware Behaviors

© 2014 IEEE.Android is the most popular smartphone operating system with a market share of 80%, but as a consequence, also the platform most targeted by malware. To deal with the increasing number of malicious Android apps in the wild, malware analysts typically rely on analysis tools to extract characteristic information about an app in an automated fashion. While the importance of such tools has been addressed by the research community, the resulting prototypes remain limited in terms of analysis capabilities and availability. In this paper we present ANDRUBIS, a fully automated, publicly available and comprehensive analysis system for Android apps. ANDRUBIS combines static analysis with dynamic analysis on both Dalvik VM and system level, as well as several stimulation techniques to increase code coverage. With ANDRUBIS, we collected a dataset of over 1,000,000 Android apps, including 40% malicious apps. This dataset allows us to discuss trends in malware behavior observed from apps dating back as far as 2010, as well as to present insights gained from operating ANDRUBIS as a publicly available service for the past two years.