Vault App Identification and Extraction (VIDE)

A method for mobile devices that identifies content hiding applications from the App Store.  Content hiding (or vault) apps allow users to hide photos, videos, documents, and other content securely. A subclass of these applications called decoy apps further supports secret hiding by having a model that mimics standard apps such as calculators but can turn into a vault-app through entering a specific input. This is an effective and very fast identification of content hiding apps through a two-phase process: initial categorization using keywords followed by more precise binary classification that extracts the hidden data from the apps on a smartphone.