Detecting third-party libraries for privacy leakage in packed android applications

Abstract

Third-party libraries are widely used in APP development, providing technical solutions for APP rich functions, but some third-party libraries can collect many user privacy information and cause data leakage. According to our survey, about 60% of Android applications use android packing services. Existing tools cannot effectively detect third-party libraries used in packed applications, and their analysis results of third-party library privacy leaks are not comprehensive. To overcome these limitations, we improve the traditional third- party library detection tools so that it can detect third-party libraries used in packed applications. We propose a fine-grained privacy-collecting third-party library detection framework for detecting the privacy leakage of third-party libraries in Android applications by combining Androguard, Frida and improved third-party library detection tools. Our experimental results on 300 mainstream apps show that our framework provides good support for analyzing packed applications, and our approach can detect more third-party libraries and provide a more comprehensive analysis of privacy leaks of third-party libraries than existing tools.