With the explosive increase in mobile apps, more and more threats migrate from traditional PC client
to mobile device. Compared with traditional Win+Intel alliance in PC, Android+ARM alliance dominates in Mobile
Internet, the apps replace the PC client software as the major target of malicious usage. In this paper, to improve
the security status of current mobile apps, we propose a methodology to evaluate mobile apps based on cloud
computing platform and data mining. We also present a prototype system named MobSafe to identify the mobile
app’s virulence or benignancy. Compared with traditional method, such as permission pattern based method,
MobSafe combines the dynamic and static analysis methods to comprehensively evaluate an Android app. In the
implementation, we adopt Android Security Evaluation Framework (ASEF) and Static Android Analysis Framework
(SAAF), the two representative dynamic and static analysis methods, to evaluate the Android apps and estimate
the total time needed to evaluate all the apps stored in one mobile app market. Based on the real trace from a
commercial mobile app market called AppChina, we can collect the statistics of the number of active Android apps,
the average number apps installed in one Android device, and the expanding ratio of mobile apps. As mobile app
market serves as the main line of defence against mobile malwares, our evaluation results show that it is practical
to use cloud computing platform and data mining to verify all stored apps routinely to filter out malware apps from
mobile app markets. As the future work, MobSafe can extensively use machine learning to conduct automotive
forensic analysis of mobile apps based on the generated multifaceted data in this stage.