Quantifying the Danger of Mobile Banking Applications on the Android Platform

The percentage of consumers that utilize mobile banking has increased in the past year and continues to grow. Mobile users are concerned about, but often do not understand the security risks that might be involved when conducting financial transactions through a mobile application. This research investigates application permissions and whether they are categorized as dangerous or normal as per the Android developer guidelines. In the absence of an existing risk index, we created ADI (Application Danger Index) based on these two types of permissions to help quantify the possible danger of each mobile banking application. Additionally a comparison was made between the percentage frequency of common permissions that occur in benign, malicious and banking applications to further inspect the potential danger in banking applications. Results showed that while banking applications did have an increased potential for danger, they more closely resembled benign applications than malicious applications. Keywords—Mobile Banking; Android; Risk