DaPanda: Detecting Aggressive Push Notification in Android Apps
Mobile push notification is widely used in mobile platforms to deliver all sorts of information to app users. Although it offers great convenience for both app developers and mobile users, this feature was recurrently reported to serve malicious and aggressive purposes, such as delivering annoying push notification advertisement. However, to the best of our knowledge, our research community has not touched the problem yet, neither providing techniques to detect/prevent them, nor characterizing this issue in the mobile app ecosystem at large-scale. This paper presents the first study to detect aggressive push notifications and further characterize them in large-scale. To this end, we first provide a taxonomy of mobile push notifications and pick out the aggressive ones using a crowdsourcing-based method. Then we propose DaPANDA, a novel hybrid approach, aiming at automatically detecting aggressive push notifications in Android apps. DaPANDA leverages a guided testing approach to systematically trigger and consume push notifications. By instrumenting the Android framework, DaPANDA further collects all the notification-relevant runtime information for flagging aggressive ones. Our experimental results show that DaPANDA is capable of detecting aggressive push notifications across the spectrum of aggressive types. By applying DaPANDA to 20,000 Android apps, it yields over 1,000 aggressive notifications that are further confirmed to be true positives and are shared with our community to promote advanced approaches for detecting aggressive mobile push notifications.
Tue 12 NovDisplayed time zone: Tijuana, Baja California change
10:40 - 12:20 | Mobile 1Demonstrations / Research Papers / Journal First Presentations at Hillcrest Chair(s): Marouane Kessentini University of Michigan | ||
10:40 20mTalk | Test Transfer Across Mobile Apps Through Semantic Mapping Research Papers Jun-Wei Lin University of California, Irvine, Reyhaneh Jabbarvand University of California, Irvine, Sam Malek University of California, Irvine | ||
11:00 20mTalk | Test Migration Between Mobile Apps with Similar Functionality Research Papers | ||
11:20 20mTalk | DaPanda: Detecting Aggressive Push Notification in Android Apps Research Papers Tianming Liu Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China, Haoyu Wang Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China, Li Li Monash University, Australia, Guangdong Bai Griffith University, Yao Guo Peking University, Guoai Xu Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications | ||
11:40 20mTalk | Automatic, highly accurate app permission recommendation Journal First Presentations Zhongxin Liu Zhejiang University, Xin Xia Monash University, David Lo Singapore Management University, John Grundy Monash University Link to publication | ||
12:00 10mDemonstration | LIRAT: Layout and Image Recognition Driving Automated Mobile Testing of Cross-Platform Demonstrations Shengcheng Yu Nanjing University, China, Chunrong Fang Nanjing University, Yang Feng University of California, Irvine, Wenyuan Zhao Nanjing University, Zhenyu Chen Nanjing University File Attached | ||
12:10 10mDemonstration | Humanoid: A Deep Learning-based Approach to Automated Black-box Android App Testing Demonstrations Yuanchun Li Peking University, Ziyue Yang Peking University, Yao Guo Peking University, Xiangqun Chen Peking University |