Home // SECURWARE 2020, The Fourteenth International Conference on Emerging Security Information, Systems and Technologies // View article
Authors:
Stefan Kiltz
Robert Altschaffel
Thorsten Lucke
Jana Dittmann
Keywords: Privacy Measurement; Data sovereignty
Abstract:
This paper discusses means to evaluate the potential impact of data flows caused by the use of smartphone apps (applications) on the privacy of the user. While the data flows are often caused by trackers, permissions set the framework on which data can flow between the smartphones and the remote party. Hence, we devise a concept to examine privacy violations caused by trackers and permissions in mobile apps and to render the results of said examination more comparable and reliable based on the characteristics of the examination methods (custody, examined forensic data streams and type of communication). We define two different examination scenarios in which this approach can be deployed and conduct practical tests in these two scenarios. For the first scenario, the concept is applied to the static evaluation of 8 exemplary mobile apps running on the Android platform using 3 different methods (Exodus Privacy, Exodus Standalone and AppChecker) identifying 162 permissions and 42 trackers in total. The second scenario employs these three methods in order to examine the extent to which three mobile browsers reveal information towards the respective developers. Our main contributions are the application of a model of the forensic process to the examination of the loss of potential privacy due to the use of mobile apps in order to provide comparability of the findings. In addition, a proposal for a visualization scheme capable of displaying test results from privacy examinations covering a large number of examination items is proposed.
Pages: 60 to 68
Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2020
Publication date: November 21, 2020
Published in: conference
ISSN: 2162-2116
ISBN: 978-1-61208-821-1
Location: Valencia, Spain
Dates: from November 21, 2020 to November 25, 2020