Detecting and tracing leaked private phone number data in Android smartphones

Easy and open development environments of Android make itself not only as the most famous platform in the world but also as the most preferred platform for malicious users. In this paper, we propose a new approach to protect the private phone number data in smartphones from leaking and stealing through malicious applications. Our approach differently deals with trusted and suspicious applications and avoids the malfunctions of applications caused by security policy. Most of outstanding feature of our approach is that it can detect the leakage of the private phone number data, trace the leaked data and finally identify which application leaked them. Furthermore, it can minimize the damage owing to the data even though it is abused for cyber-crimes.