Trend Micro Inc.

Longping Wu

Liang Sun

Hua Ye

Bin Yin

Zhengbao Zhang

Chengyu Fang

Zhibo Zhang

Zhihua Zhou

A mobile app is in a form of a package file. A structural feature digest is generated from contents of a manifest part, bytecode part, and resource part of the package file. A mobile device receives an unknown mobile app, generates a structural feature digest of the unknown mobile app, and sends the structural feature digests to a backend system over a computer network. In the backend system, the structural feature digest of the unknown mobile app is compared to structural feature digests of known malicious mobile apps. The unknown mobile app is detected to be malicious when its structural feature digest is similar to that of a known malicious mobile app.

Detection of malicious mobile apps

A computer-implement method of detecting malware apps includes receiving a sample app for a mobile operating system. The sample app is executed in an emulator of the mobile operating system. The behavior of the sample app in the emulator is monitored to collect a string that the sample app uses to detect whether or not a target app is running in a foreground of the emulator. A bait app, which is generated using the collected string, is switched to run in the foreground. The sample app is deemed to be a malware app when the sample app instead of the bait app is running in the foreground.

Detection of malware apps that hijack app user interfaces

Software development kit (SDK) class tree structures of malicious SDKs are created, with each node of the SDK class tree structures representing a class of a corresponding malicious SDK. An app class tree structure of a mobile app is also created, with each node of the app class tree structure representing a class of the mobile app. To determine if the mobile app has been created (e.g., repackaged or originally created) using at least one of the malicious SDKs, the app class tree structure is compared against the SDK class tree structures to find an SDK class tree structure that matches the app class tree structure. For confirmation, the similarity of classes of the app class tree structure relative to classes of the SDK class tree structure can be determined.

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Nanjing, China

Longping Wu