Execution Enhanced Static Detection Of Android Privacy Leakage Hidden By Dynamic Class Loading

Mobile apps often need to collect and/or access sensitive user information to fulfill their purposes, but they may also leak such information either intentionally or accidentally, causing financial and/or emotional damages to users. In the past few years, researchers have developed various techniques to detect privacy leakage in mobile apps, however, such detection remains a challenging task when privacy leakage is implemented via dynamic class loading (DCL).In this work, we propose the DL2 technique that enhances static analysis with dynamic app execution to effectively detect privacy leakage implemented via DCL in Android apps. To evaluate DL2, we construct a benchmark of 88 subject apps with 2578 injected privacy leaks and apply DL2 to the apps. DL 2 was able to detect 1073, or 42%, of the leaks, significantly outperforming existing state-of-the-art privacy leakage detection tools.