عنوان

Identifying Copycat Counterfeit Apps in the Google Play Store

Number

TL56653

.Language of Text, Soundtrack etc

انگلیسی

Title Proper

Identifying Copycat Counterfeit Apps in the Google Play Store

General Material Designation

[Thesis]

First Statement of Responsibility

Ganatra, Sonali

Subsequent Statement of Responsibility

Narain, Sashank

Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.

University of Massachusetts Lowell

Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.

2021

Text of Note

50 p.

Dissertation or thesis details and type of degree

M.S.

Body granting the degree

University of Massachusetts Lowell

Text preceding or following the note

2021

Text of Note

We live in a digital world and the technology is growing at a fast pace. Today, whether we use android or iOS phones, we have mobile apps available for everything. The massive use of mobile devices as well as the monetary benefits in digital marketing has attracted the attention of potential attackers who exploit the openness of such systems to steal user identity, access and sell user sensitive information. This has also led to an increase in the number of counterfeit apps on the app store. Much research has already been done and steps have been taken to address this problem. These counterfeit apps can collect user's personal information as well as device information and share it with third parties without the knowledge or consent of the user. Identity theft, money laundering, click fraud, and spying are some of the threats associated with these mobile malwares. In this thesis, we focused on identifying copycats of the popular apps on the Google play store. We crawled the Google play store and mined the app description from more than 180,000 popular apps. The app description text was analyzed and then clustered based on similarity. Additionally, we have applied clustering techniques on the app icons using image similarity algorithm. The results from the above two algorithms are then combined and analyzed to identify the counterfeit apps. We were able to identify several counterfeit apps on the Google play store. These counterfeit apps are a copycat of some very popular apps. Based on our results, it is evident that Google has very little protection in place for such copycat counterfeit apps.

Subject Term

Computer science

Subject Term

Information technology

Subject Term

Management

Subject Term

Social research

Subject Term

Sociology

Subject Term

Systems science

Subject Term

Web studies

Ganatra, Sonali

Narain, Sashank

University of Massachusetts Lowell

Electronic name

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y