AdRob: Examining the Landscape and Impact of Android Application Plagiarism

Clint Gibler, Ryan Stevens, Jonathan Crussell, Hao Chen, Hui Zang, Heesook Choi

Malicious activities involving Android applications are rising
rapidly.  As prior work on cyber-crimes suggests, we need to
understand the economic incentives of the criminals to design the most
effective defenses.  In this paper, we investigate application
plagiarism on Android markets at a large scale.  We take the first
step to characterize plagiarized applications and estimate their
impact on the original application developers.  We first crawled
265,359 free applications from 17 Android markets around the world and
ran a tool to identify similar applications (``clones'').  Based on
the data, we examined properties of the cloned applications, including
their distribution across different markets, application categories,
and ad libraries.  Next, we examined how cloned applications affect
the original developers.  We captured HTTP advertising traffic
generated by mobile applications at a tier-1 US cellular carrier for
12 days.  To associate each Android application with its advertising
traffic, we extracted a unique advertising identifier (called the
client ID) from both the applications and the network traces.  We
estimate a lower bound on the advertising revenue that cloned
applications siphon from the original developers, and the user base
that cloned applications divert from the original applications.  To
the best of our knowledge, this is the first large scale study on the
characteristics of cloned mobile applications and their impact on the
original developers.