iLibScope: Reliable Third-Party Library Detection for iOS Mobile Apps
Jingyi Guo, Min Zheng, Yajin Zhou, Haoyu Wang, Lei Wu, Xiapu Luo, Kui, Ren

TL;DR
iLibScope is a novel tool that accurately detects third-party libraries and their versions in iOS apps, addressing code duplication challenges to enhance security vetting and vulnerability detection.
Contribution
The paper introduces a profile-based similarity approach for reliable third-party library detection in iOS apps, overcoming code duplication issues and achieving high accuracy.
Findings
Recall exceeds 99% in library detection
Precision exceeds 97% in library detection
Identified 405 vulnerable libraries in real-world apps
Abstract
Vetting security impacts introduced by third-party libraries in iOS apps requires a reliable library detection technique. Especially when a new vulnerability (or a privacy-invasive behavior) was discovered in a third-party library, there is a practical need to precisely identify the existence of libraries and their versions for iOS apps. However, few studies have been proposed to tackle this problem, and they all suffer from the code duplication problem in different libraries. In this paper, we focus on third-party library detection in iOS apps. Given an app, we aim to identify the integrated libraries and pinpoint their versions (or the version range).To this end, we first conduct an in-depth study on iOS third-party libraries to demystify the code duplication challenge. By doing so, we have two key observations: 1) even though two libraries can share classes, the shared classes cannot…
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Taxonomy
TopicsAdvanced Malware Detection Techniques · Web Application Security Vulnerabilities · Security and Verification in Computing
