One challenge we faced in our research was that of access-
ing the targeted sensitive data on the Android device. The
Android operating system requires applications to request
ne-grained permissions from the user (e.g. permission to
access the network, and permission to access the contacts
list). Applications that have both network access and ac-
cess to sensitive data such as the contacts list raise suspi-
cions from the user who must approve these permissions, and
from security software that identies over-privileged appli-
cations [10]. Exasperating this problem is the fact that ap-
plications on the Android platform are executed in isolated
running environments. The Android operating system is a
Linux-based OS where each application is run as a distinct
user and group, which creates a sandboxed environment that
separates each application from one another and from the
underlying system. This prevents dividing the application
into multiple applications with separate security privileges
in an attempt to avoid raising suspicion.