TacDroid: Detection of Illicit Apps Through Hybrid Analysis of UI-Based Transition Graphs

Illicit apps have emerged as a thriving underground industry, driven by their substantial profitability. These apps either offer users restricted services (e.g., porn and gambling) or engage in fraudulent activities like scams. Despite the widespread presence of illicit apps, scant attention has been directed towards this issue, with several existing detection methods predominantly relying on static analysis alone. However, given the burgeoning trend wherein an increasing number of mobile apps achieve their core functionality through dynamic resource loading, depending solely on static analysis proves inadequate. To address this challenge, in this paper, we introduce Tac-droid,a novel approach that integrates dynamic analysis for dynamic content retrieval with static analysis to mitigate the limitations inherent in both methods, i.e., the low coverage of dynamic analysis and the low accuracy of static analysis. Specifically, Tacdroid conducts both dynamic and static analyses on an Android app to construct dynamic and static User Interface Transition Graphs (UTGs), respectively. These two UTGs are then correlated to create an intermediate UTG. Subsequently, Tacdroid embeds graph structure and utilizes an enhanced Graph Autoencoder (GAE) model to predict transitions between nodes. Through link prediction, Tacdroid effectively eliminates false positive transition edges stemming from misjudgments in static analysis and supplements false negative transition edges overlooked in the intermediate UTG, thereby generating a comprehensive and accurate UTG. Finally, Tacdroid determines the legitimacy of an app and identifies its category based on the app's UTG. Our evaluation results highlight the outstanding accuracy of Tacdroid in detecting illicit apps. It significantly surpasses the state-of-the-art work, achieving an F1-score of 96.73%. This work represents a notable advancement in the identification and categorization of illicit apps.