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Static Analysis of Superfluous Network Transmissions in Android Applications

The network transmission is an important way to exchange information between Android applications and their own backend or other third-party servers. However, some network transmissions are superfluous for the apps’ functionalities. Superfluous network transmissions not only increase the network traffic but also may leak users’ sensitive data. To identify the superfluous network transmissions, we propose a static-analysis based approach. Evaluation with real world market apps shows that 62% apps contain superfluous network transmissions, and 48% of the analyzed network transmissions are superfluous, and our approach could effectively detect superfluous network transmissions in Android apps.