DeUEDroid: Detecting Underground Economy Apps Based on UTG Similarity

Abstract: In recent years, the underground economy is proliferating in the mobile system. These underground economy apps (UEware) make profits from providing non-compliant services, especially in sensitive areas such as gambling, pornography, and loans. Unlike traditional malware, most of them (over 80%) do not have malicious payloads. Due to their unique characteristics, existing detection approaches cannot effectively and efficiently mitigate this emerging threat. To address this problem, we propose a novel approach to effectively and efficiently detect UEware by considering their UI transition graphs (UTGs). Based on the proposed approach, we design and implement a system named DeUEDroid to perform the detection. To evaluate DeUEDroid, we collect 25,717 apps and build the first large-scale ground-truth dataset (1,700 apps) of UEware. The evaluation result based on the ground-truth dataset shows that DeUEDroid can cover new UI features and statically construct precise UTG. It achieves 98.22% detection F1-score and 98.97% classification accuracy, significantly outperforming traditional approaches. The evaluation involving 24,017 apps demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of UEware detection in real-world scenarios. Furthermore, the result reveals that UEware are prevalent, with 54% of apps in the wild and 11% of apps in app stores being UEware. Our work sheds light on future work in analyzing and detecting UEware.