Comparative study of techniques for detecting emulators on Android devices

Abstract

The growth in the mobile ecosystem provide a fertile ground for malicious activities. Malicious users might use mobile emulators to commit fraudulent acts. Such practice has already caused serious damage to app service providers. Therefore, the need for effectively detecting whether an app is running in an emulator must be considered. There is a set of proposed techniques by open source projects and academic papers. In this work, we perform a comparison analysis of some of the existing techniques. Our results show that none of the proposed techniques is effective to all emulators, with some being unable to detect the emulators they were designed to detect. We have also found that the current Nox emulator version for macOS is not detected by any technique.