Toward Intelligent Tracking Down of Malicious Applications Pre-installed on Smartphones Sold in African Emerging Markets

This paper focuses on the behavior of pre-installed software on Android smartphones sold in emerging markets in Africa. The paper analyzes 1498 applications pre-installed on a number of low-cost smartphones on sale in African markets. The static analysis, based on the Mobile Security Framework (MoBSF) platform, reveals serious risks for users of these smartphones. These risks include excessive permission requests to the operating system, triggered vulnerabilities as well as network security issues. Many of the applications analyzed present no or only benign risks, while a few present serious threats that require further investigation. The analysis carried out on mobile applications by MoBSF has made it possible to extract suspicious features from potentially malicious applications.