A First Look at Security Risks of Android TV Apps

In this paper, we present to the community the first preliminary study on the security risks of Android TV apps. To the best of our knowledge, despite the fact that various efforts have been put into analyzing Android apps, our community has not explored TV versions of Android apps. There is hence no publicly available dataset containing Android TV apps. To this end, We start by collecting a large set of Android TV apps from the official Google Play store. We then experimentally look at those apps from four security aspects: VirusTotal scans, requested permissions, security flaws, and privacy leaks. Our experimental results reveal that, similar to that of Android smartphone apps, Android TV apps can also come with different security issues. We hence argue that our community should pay more attention to analyze Android TV apps.