App Threat Report: The State of Game Security

Welcome to our Q1 App Threat Report, Promon’s quarterly analysis of current topics in mobile application security produced by our Security Research Team.

This report reviews mobile gaming security, exploring how the top games by revenue protect themselves against hooking frameworks, repackaging, and rooted devices.

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Welcome to our Q1 App Threat Report, Promon’s quarterly analysis of current topics in mobile application security produced by our Security Research Team. This report reviews mobile gaming security, exploring how the top games by revenue protect themselves against hooking frameworks, repackaging, and rooted devices.

Our Q1 report explores the overall security level for mobile games. To assess that level, we checked more than 350 Android games to see how they fared against our repackaging attacks, deployment of hooking frameworks, and how they handled the detection of a rooted device. Initial results showed that most apps were vulnerable to our attacks.

Highlights from the report

Promon tested 357 of the world’s highest revenue-generating mobile games for Android. These games represent more than $10.5 Billion in annual revenue according to SensorTower data.

81%

of the apps tested offered no defenses against repackaging or hooking and did not detect running on a rooted device

15.7%

of gaming apps deployed some form of repackaging detection, making it the most "defended against" attack vector

1

Only one app could detect the presence of a rooted device when we used all appropriate hiding methods, making it the security area of the least concern to game developers.