A Multi-modal Neural Embeddings Approach for Detecting Mobile Counterfeit Apps

Counterfeit apps impersonate existing popular apps in attempts to misguide users. Many counterfeits can be identified once installed, however even a tech-savvy user may struggle to detect them before installation. In this paper, we propose a novel approach of combining content embeddings and style embeddings generated from pre-trained convolutional neural networks to detect counterfeit apps. We present an analysis of approximately 1.2 million apps from Google Play Store and identify a set of potential counterfeits for top-10,000 apps. Under conservative assumptions, we were able to find 2,040 potential counterfeits that contain malware in a set of 49,608 apps that showed high similarity to one of the top-10,000 popular apps in Google Play Store. We also find 1,565 potential counterfeits asking for at least five additional dangerous permissions than the original app and 1,407 potential counterfeits having at least five extra third party advertisement libraries.