Detecting Third-Party Libraries in Android Applications with High Precision and Recall

Yuan Zhang, Jiarun Dai, Xiaohan Zhang, Sirong Huang, Zhemin Yang, Min Yang, and Hao Chen

Third-party libraries are widely used in Android applications to ease development and enhance functionalities. However, the incorporated libraries also bring new security & privacy issues to the host application, and blur the accounting between application code and library code. Under this situation, a precise and reliable library detector is highly desirable. In fact, library code may be customized by developers during integration and dead library code may be eliminated by code obfuscators during application build process. However, existing research on library detection has not gracefully handled these problems, thus facing severe limitations in practice.