A Taxonomy of Program Analysis Techniques for Security Assessment of Android Apps

We present a comprehensive review of the existing approaches for Android security analysis. The review is carried out to achieve the following objectives:

• To provide a basis taxonomy for consistently and comprehensively classifying Android security assessment mechanisms and research approaches;
• To provide a systematic literature review of the state-of-the-art research in this area using the proposed taxonomy;
• To identify trends, patterns, and gaps through observations and comparative analysis across Android security assessment systems; and
• To provide a set of recommendations for deriving a research agenda for future developments.

We have followed the systematic literature review process, and analyzed the results of more than 300 research papers published in diverse journals and conferences.