Smartphones are the latest technology trend of the 21st century. Today's social expectation of always staying connected and the need for an increase in productivity are the reasons for the increase in smartphone usage. One of the leaders of the smartphone evolution is Google's Android Operating System (OS). The openness of the design and the ease of customizing are the aspects that are placing Android ahead of the other smartphone OSs. Such popularity has not only led to an increase in Android usage but also to the rise of Android malware. Although such malware is not having a significant impact on the popularity of Android smartphones, it is however creating new possibilities for threats. One such threat is the impact of botnets on Android smartphones. Recently, malware has surfaced that revealed specific characteristics relating to traditional botnet activities. Malware such as Geinimi, Pjapps, DroidDream, and RootSmart all display traditional botnet functionalities. These malicious applications show that Android botnets is a reality. From a security perspective it is important to understand the underlying structure of an Android botnet. This paper evaluates Android malware with the purpose of identifying specific trends and characteristics relating to botnet behaviour. The botnet trends and characteristics are detected by a comprehensive literature study of well-known Android malware applications. The identified characteristics are then further explored in terms of the Android Botnet Development Model and the Android Botnet Discovery Process. The common identified trends and characteristics aid the understanding of Android botnet activities as well as the possible discovery of an Android bot. View full abstract»

Several new Android smartphones support Near Field Communication (NFC). The Android SDK provides an NFC API that can be used to develop NFC applications that conduct peer-to-peer (P2P) data exchange. The Android emulator does not support P2P communication between instances of the Android Virtual Device (AVD). In addition to this constraint, P2P experimentation on actual smartphones is difficult due to limited NFC support. To fill the gap created by this minimal support, we propose the JavaMail NFC API (JNFC). JNFC uses the JavaMail API to emulate the functionality of the Android NFC P2P API. To evaluate the performance of JNFC, we created the DroidWSN Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) model and implemented it as an Android application. We design and conduct an experiment for our DroidWSN model to measure the execution time of our Android application WSN on AVDs. We compare our simulation results against those from a similar experiment that measured the execution time of a WSN composed of Sun SPOT wireless devices. While the execution time of our DroidWSN model is slower, we assert that our design is more simple and flexible than that of our comparison study. We conclude that this benefit and the factors of JNFC cost (it is open source), the quality and quantity of Android smartphone sensors, and imminent Android smartphone support for NFC P2P, combine to make JNFC and the Android AVD a platform for NFC and WSN research. Our study also emphasizes the need for Google to create Android NFC P2P and sensor emulation APIs. View full abstract»

The rapid growth of smartphones has lead to a renaissance for mobile application services. Android and iOS now as the most popular smartphone platforms offer a public marketplace respectively, the Android Market and App Store- but operate with dramatically different approaches to prevent malware on their devices. In Android platform, developer not only can directly deliver their apps on the Android market without strict review process, but also is capable to put the non-official verified apps marketplace (i.e., Applanet, AppBrain and so on). In this study, we purpose an automatic Android malware detection mechanism based on the result from sandbox. We leverage network spatial feature extraction of Android apps and independent component analysis (ICA) to find the intrinsic domain name resolution behavior of Android malware. The proposed mechanism that identifies the Android malware can achieve in automatic way. For evaluation the proposed approach, the public Android malware apps dataset and popular benign apps collected from Android Market are used for evaluating the effectiveness in analyzing the grouping ability and the effectiveness of identifying the Android malware. The proposed approach successfully identifies malicious Android Apps close to 100% accuracy, precision and recall rate. View full abstract»

Android is one of the most widely spread mobile platform. Many people are using Android mobile devices and many developers are creating Android applications at this moment. When developing applications, the differences in performance between Java and C/C++ are a well-known issue. Because this is also true in Android, many Android application developers prefer to use the Android NDK along with Java compared to using only Java language. However, there are certain performance gaps in not only using different programming languages but also in using glibc of a native cross-compiler and bionic libc of the Android NDK. In this paper, we show the difference in performance between Android applications compiled by using a native cross-compiler for ARM and a native shared library through the JNI of the Android NDK. We used Mibench, a representative embedded benchmark suite that can be used freely with no restrictions. As a result, it was found that using the native shared library through the JNI of the Android NDK is faster compared to using the native cross-compiler for ARM in five of six cases. View full abstract»

With the growing popularity of Android platform, Android application market becomes a major distribution center where Android users download apps. Unlike most of the PC apps, Android apps manipulates personal information such as contract and SMS messages, and leakage of such information may cause great loss to the Android users. Thus, detecting information leakage on Android is in urgent need. However, till now, there is still no complete vetting process applied to Android markets. State-of-the-art approaches for detecting Android information leakage apply dynamic analysis on user site, thus they introduce large runtime overhead to the Android apps. This paper proposes a new approach called Leak Miner, which detects leakage of sensitive information on Android with static taint analysis. Unlike dynamic approaches, Leak Miner analyzes Android apps on market site. Thus, it does not introduce runtime overhead to normal execution of target apps. Besides, Leak Miner can detect information leakage before apps are distributed to users, so malicious apps can be removed from market before users download them. Our evaluation result shows that Leak Miner can detect 145 true information leakages inside a 1750 app set. View full abstract»

Due to technological progress, today's mobile phones have evolved into technically and functionally sophisticated smartphones which have more in common with computers than with the conventional phones. As a result of their popularity and functionality, smartphones are a burgeoning target for malicious activities In Android privacy; we undertake two aspects such as user and developer. For users, a known fact in Android mobile, any app can be downloaded from Android Market without accessing a significant quantity of personal data which is different in App Store. For app developers, the App Store's method acquires developed app need to be signed using a private encryption key. Furthermore, several privacy related data such as personal information, IMEI, and location which are leaks already existing in Android Smartphone for a while. In this paper, we explain what kind of data is at risk and how to acquire them programmatically without the user's permission. We will focus on how to obtain the data illicitly which are of Android privacy concerns and the categorization of these Android privacy issues. For example, mobile number, email accounts, keyboard cache entries, browser searches and the most recent location are sensitive data attractive to the attackers. This paper also shows how we use the Android API to perform our Spyware to obtain the sensitive information. Some attack scenarios and recommendations are also presented. View full abstract»

To deliver a high quality software system in a short release cycle time, many software organizations chose to reuse existing mature software systems. Google has adapted one of the most reused computer operating systems (i.e., Linux) into an operating system for mobile devices (i.e., Android). The Android mobile operating system has become one of the most popular adaptations of the Linux kernel with approximately 60 millions new mobile devices running Android each year. Despite many studies on Linux, none have investigated the challenges and benefits of reusing and adapting the Linux kernel to mobile platforms. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study to understand how Android adapts the Linux kernel. Using software repositories from Linux and Android, we assess the effort needed to reuse and adapt the Linux kernel into Android. Results show that (1) only 0.7% of files from the Linux kernel are modified when reused for a mobile platform; (2) only 5% of Android files are affected by the merging of changes on files from the Linux repository to the Android repository; and (3) 95% of bugs experienced by users of the Android kernel are fixed in the Linux kernel repository. These results can help development teams to better plan software adaptations. View full abstract»

Google's Android Native Development Kit (NDK) is a toolset that lets you embed components to use of native code in your Android applications. It makes possible for developers to easily compile in C/C++ for the Android development platform. Generally, developer does not concern how effective between native code and Dalvik Java code that will causes poor performance of Android. There are some researches discussed about benchmark Java and C/C++. But they do not consider the issues of Dalvik and native code for Android programming or evaluate them in real Android device. In this work, we use a more complete approach to benchmark Dalvik java code and Native code on real Android device. We conducted 12 test programs to analyze the performance and found that native code faster than Dalvik Java code for about 34.2%. View full abstract»

Mobile devices and embedded devices need more processing power but energy consumption should be less to save battery power. Open Handset Alliance (OHA) hosting members like Google, Motorola, HTC etc released an open source platform Android for mobile devices. Android is also used in netbook and embedded platform. Android runs on top of linux kernel with a custom JVM set on top of it. Android uses new power management framework to save power in mobile devices. Android developers are allowed to build only JAVA applications. Google tries to make Android as energy efficient as possible to save battery power in mobile devices. In this work, we present benefits of using Android in low power embedded devices. We compared Android JAVA performance with popular Sun embedded JVM running on top of Angstrom linux. Our work shows that Android provides better VM designs but consumes more energy due to lack of dynamic compiler in Dalvik JVM. The implication is that, Android can become more energy efficient by implementing an optimized dynamic compiler in Dalvik JVM. View full abstract»

In the corporate world today, managers are always faced with a lot of decisions to make based on data generated at their various offices. The decision-making process is very vital as decisions taken by management could make a company either overtake or stay within reach of its competitors. This paper presents the design and development of an Android application that would retrieve summarised data from a central database process and display that information on an android device so as to aid managers in their decision-making process. The components of designed and developed system include (1) a web application through which workers would input data at their various workplaces (2) a database hosted on a central server that would store information entered by workers (3) an application programming interface (API) that would take requests from the Android application, query the database and serve the results back to the Android application and (4) an android application that processes and displays results to users. The android application is developed using Eclipse in conjunction with android SDK tools. The application retrieves data from a database per user request and displays the retrieved information on an android device. Users of this application would be able to analyse data quicker hence make quick decisions as they would not be drowned in a flood of detailed information. There is also an added benefit of having access to company data on the go. View full abstract»

Both appearance and motion are important considerations in designing robots for interaction with humans. In communication, humans sense intelligence in their conversation partner. We aim to develop an intelligent robot that communicates in the same intelligent and human-like way in daily life. We use the total Turing test to evaluate the human-likeness of the android. In this test, subjects are shown either the android or another human for a short time. Subjects are then asked whether it was a human being or not. The android used in this study is called ReplieeQ2, which has an appearance and motions that closely resemble those of a human being. We hypothesize that an android that is given more human-like motions will be identified as a human in the total Turing test more often. To create human-like motion we observed humans behavior when sitting. We focused on eye, eyelid, neck and chest motions and analyzed them in detail. The android motions were made from this analysis and used in the Total Turing Test. We prepared three conditions: a static android (SA), an android given natural motions (MA), and a human sitting naturally (SH). We expose a subject to one of these conditions for either one or two seconds. We then examine how often they correctly identify the condition as either human or robot. SH was identified as human most often, followed by MA and then SA, for both exposure times. MA is judged to be significantly more humanlike than SA, within the two-second experiment time. This suggests that natural motions contribute to the human-likeness of the android. We also investigate the contributions of individual natural motions to human-likeness and likeability by a pair comparison method. The results show that eyelid motion is the most effective factor for expressing human-likeness and likeability. By enhancing the android's expressive power, this work contributes to the development of humanoids that communicate naturally with human beings. View full abstract»

The Android platform is one of the most popular used embedded OS, is mounted on robot, TVs, especially on Smart phones. Because general android applications are developed by the JAVA language, it is very slow in case which requires many calculational operations such as image processing. To overcome these defects, the Android OS is supporting JNI with the Android NDK, which makes available to use the C libraries in the android at application level. Through NDK, the Android applications can approach hardware and is able to developed high speed application. In this paper, we consider that how to enhance performance of the JAVA applications by using the Android NDK. We compared original NyARToolKit, which is augmented reality engine, with the improved NyARToolKit using the NDK. Through this experiment, we confirmed that android application programmers can make their application efficiently by using the NDK. We could increase speed of NyARToolKit by 1.869 times in our experiment. This paper presents a guideline for an effective way to use native code libraries in Android applications. View full abstract»

In this work, we have studied Android Architecture from a security point of view. We have studied various defense mechanisms that are present in current Android Platform or are recently proposed. We took inspiration from Sound comber - a recent Android Trojan that steals sensitive information using various techniques. We enhanced the capabilities of Sound comber in terms of its stealthiness and efficiency in malicious communication by identifying new covert channel and incorporating basic compression. We then developed a new Android Trojan - Contact Archiver (steals user contacts) which inherits properties from Sound comber, i.e. uses few and innocuous permissions, circumvents already-known security defenses, conveys information remotely without direct network access plus incorporates enhancements proposed by us. We also propose some defense possibilities to detect Contact Archiver covert communication. Our future work will be to block security attacks performed using our enhancements, when they are used in any Android malware. View full abstract»

Present android-based location and message sharing system asks to input the personal information which fails to protect the privacy of information, has no centralized database which is causing the problem of data management and portability, and one main drawback is unable to have a secured two way communication between webserver and android based application. And this Android-based Location and Message Sharing System (ALMSS) is proposed for solving above mention problem. The proposed system uses Java programming language for android mobile user application, PHP programming language as webserver, MySQL as external database to store the data, JSON as intermediary between android platform and webserver and uses symmetric cryptography while communicating between android device and webserver which finally assures the protection of information. View full abstract»

An important part of natural, and therefore effective, communication is facial motion. The android Repliee Q2 should therefore display realistic facial motion. In computer graphics animation, such motion is created by mapping human motion to the animated character. This paper proposes a method for mapping human facial motion to the android. This is done using a linear model of the android, based on blendshape models used in computer graphics. The model is derived from motion capture of the android and therefore also models the android's physical limitations. The paper shows that the blendshape method can be successfully applied to the android. Also, it is shown that a linear model is sufficient for representing android facial motion, which means control can be very straightforward. Measurements of the produced motion identify the physical limitations of the android and allow identifying the main areas for improvement of the android design. View full abstract»

The market for smart phones has been booming in the past few years. There are now over 400,000 applications on the Android market. Over 10 billion Android applications have been downloaded from the Android market. Due to the Android popularity, there are now a large number of malicious vendors targeting the platform. Many honest end users are being successfully hacked on a regular basis. In this work, a cloud based reputation security model has been proposed as a solution which greatly mitigates the malicious attacks targeting the Android market. Our security solution takes advantage of the fact that each application in the android platform is assigned a unique user id (UID). Our solution stores the reputation of Android applications in an anti-malware providers' cloud (AM Cloud). The experimental results witness that the proposed model could well identify the reputation index of a given application and hence its potential of being risky or not. View full abstract»

Since mobile devices have become more and more powerful and distributive, mobile computing has greatly changed our daily life. As one of the most popular mobile operating systems, Android provides the tools and API for Android developer to develop Android applications. The Android application development college challenge is a influential Android developer contest for college students in China. This contest has been held for two times since 2010. It encourages college students to design and implement their applications on the Android platform. In this way, it gives the students an opportunity to show their creativity and learn about the development of Android applications. The influence of the contest is keeping increasing, and students from more universities and regions take part in the contest. In this paper we introduce the organization of such a contest. View full abstract»

The Android platform used for mobile devices can be applied to embedded systems, such as robot control systems. Developers should create applications by using Java language provided by Android SDK for embedded systems operated via Android platforms. However, in many existing embedded systems, developers have written applications for controlling the system by using C language. Android NDK makes it possible for developers to easily reuse such legacy code written in C/C++ languages. In this paper, we show the difference in terms of performance between an Android application using native code library from C source and an Android application using the same algorithm written in Java language only. We conducted an experiment on five parts: JNI communication delay, integer calculation, floating-point calculation, memory access algorithm, and heap memory allocation algorithm. This paper presents a guideline for an effective way to use native code libraries in Android applications. View full abstract»

Recently, the threat of Android malware is spreading rapidly, especially those repackaged Android malware. Although understanding Android malware using dynamic analysis can provide a comprehensive view, it is still subjected to high cost in environment deployment and manual efforts in investigation. In this study, we propose a static feature-based mechanism to provide a static analyst paradigm for detecting the Android malware. The mechanism considers the static information including permissions, deployment of components, Intent messages passing and API calls for characterizing the Android applications behavior. In order to recognize different intentions of Android malware, different kinds of clustering algorithms can be applied to enhance the malware modeling capability. Besides, we leverage the proposed mechanism and develop a system, called Droid Mat. First, the Droid Mat extracts the information (e.g., requested permissions, Intent messages passing, etc) from each application's manifest file, and regards components (Activity, Service, Receiver) as entry points drilling down for tracing API Calls related to permissions. Next, it applies K-means algorithm that enhances the malware modeling capability. The number of clusters are decided by Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) method on the low rank approximation. Finally, it uses kNN algorithm to classify the application as benign or malicious. The experiment result shows that the recall rate of our approach is better than one of well-known tool, Androguard, published in Black hat 2011, which focuses on Android malware analysis. In addition, Droid Mat is efficient since it takes only half of time than Androguard to predict 1738 apps as benign apps or Android malware. View full abstract»

The presence of mobile devices has increased in our lives offering almost the same functionality as a personal computer. Android devices have appeared lately and, since then, the number of applications available for this operating system have increased exponentially. Google already has its Android Market where applications are offered and, as happens with every popular media, is prone to misuse. A malware writer may insert a malicious application into this market without being noticed. Indeed, there are already several cases of Android malware within the Android Market. Therefore, an approach that can automatically characterise the different types of applications can be helpful for both organising the Android Market and detecting fraudulent or malicious applications. In this paper, we propose a new method for categorising Android applications through machine-learning techniques. To represent each application, our method extracts different feature sets: (i) the frequency of occurrence of the printable strings, (ii) the different permissions of the application itself and (iii) the permissions of the application extracted from the Android Market. We evaluate this approach of automatically categorisation of Android applications and show that achieves a high performance. View full abstract»

This paper discusses the basic concepts involved in porting android to any hardware. In this paper, we discuss in detail the layered architecture of Android, the layer to which developers gain access and the working of the architecture. Here, we also discuss how Android works on any hardware and the concepts that outline the porting of Android onto any hardware. This paper discusses about the linux kernel used for Android and the Android file system made with Android images. View full abstract»

The use of Smartphones in business has grown in the recent years bringing new ways to create and share information. Among the operating systems used by smartphones, Android has the most growing usage rate. Most recent Android versions have some security controls; however, there is a lack in the use of strong security controls for Android 2.3 (Gingerbread), which is the most spread version of this operating system. This leaves vulnerable company and user information stored in such devices. This work presents how to improve Android's security by adding more security controls to devices using the version 2.3 and by this way meet the security levels needed for the business and secure users environments. The security polices where added to Android's source code and to the data space. View full abstract»

The emerging Android market gives rise to much interest of application developers because of its open API and SDK support. However, most Android applications are downloaded to the CPEs directly to deem the telecom network as a pipe. To enrich telecom services and fulfill all-IP network evolution, the IMS is believed to be the core of NGN. To greatly catch the trend of apps market, an innovative ICT service creation approach is proposed to integrate IMS service platform and Android apps development. In this paper, an ICT service creation platform is implemented and presented, under that Android applications can be developed to allow multiparty collaboration be initiated by simply making a call. To illustrate the use of the platform, an Android online game is also developed. Based on the proposed service creation approach, a new ICT service model is revealed and the telecom operators can much more benefit from the Android application development. View full abstract»

This paper presents an approach of using Google's Android software stack as an application environment for digital television (DTV) sets and set-top boxes. Expanding Android software stack to support DTV decoder devices and developing universal TV and set-top box applications for Android environment enables rapid software development and shorter release time for next generation products. Paper describes the process of porting complete Android software stack (Android Linux kernel, system drivers, user space libraries, Android specific libraries and programs) to a DTV decoder platform with Linux kernel and available stable device drivers; implementation of extensions to support DTV channel search, memorizing, playback and recording. Performance and features of final system will be presented. View full abstract»

Memory management is a vital parameter in efficient working of any operating system. In the mobile devices, internal memory plays an important role in managing the running of process, services and applications which are either installed by the user or which are already present in the device. Thus this paper aims towards giving an approach for better utilization of the internal memory present in Android operating system for mobile phones. The memory architecture for the Android device has been studied and has been observed that the device comes loaded with many applications which require high RAM consumption for efficient working. Thus taking into consideration running of so many applications processes and services, it is important to efficiently use and manage the internal memory space present inside the mobile operating system. For this purpose, a dictionary based application called SMSLingo has been developed for compression of SMS texting. This application requires less memory space and less RAM consumption as compared to the default SMS messaging service provided by Android. Memory management of Android system has been compared with the one in Linux System. It has been observed that Mapped Memory, Anonymous Memory and Slab Memory is present in Android which is used for allotting temporary storage space for the data frequently used. View full abstract»