Is your personal data at risk? App analytics to the rescue

According to Virustotal, a prominent virus and malware tool, the Google Play Store has a few thousand apps from major malware families. Given such a revelation, access control systems for mobile data management, have reached a state of critical importance. We propose the development of a system which would help us detect the pathways using which user's data is being stolen from their mobile devices. We use a multi layered approach which includes app meta data analysis, understanding code patterns and detecting and eventually controlling dynamic data flow when such an app is installed on a mobile device. In this presentation we focus on the first part of our work and discuss the merits and flaws of our unsupervised learning mechanism to detect possible malicious behavior from apps in the Google Play Store.