Davide Caputo

Davide Caputo, Francesco Pagano, Giovanni Bottino et al.

Mobile applications (hereafter, apps) collect a plethora of information regarding the user behavior and his device through third-party analytics libraries. However, the collection and usage of such data raised several privacy concerns, mainly because the end-user - i.e., the actual owner of the data - is out of the loop in this collection process. Also, the existing privacy-enhanced solutions that emerged in the last years follow an "all or nothing" approach, leaving the user the sole option to accept or completely deny the access to privacy-related data. This work has the two-fold objective of assessing the privacy implications on the usage of analytics libraries in mobile apps and proposing a data anonymization methodology that enables a trade-off between the utility and privacy of the collected data and gives the user complete control over the sharing process. To achieve that, we present an empirical privacy assessment on the analytics libraries contained in the 4500 most-used Android apps of the Google Play Store between November 2020 and January 2021. Then, we propose an empowered anonymization methodology, based on MobHide, that gives the end-user complete control over the collection and anonymization process. Finally, we empirically demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of such anonymization methodology thanks to HideDroid, a fully-fledged anonymization app for the Android ecosystem.

Andrea Ranieri, Davide Caputo, Luca Verderame et al.

Smart speakers and voice-based virtual assistants are core components for the success of the IoT paradigm. Unfortunately, they are vulnerable to various privacy threats exploiting machine learning to analyze the generated encrypted traffic. To cope with that, deep adversarial learning approaches can be used to build black-box countermeasures altering the network traffic (e.g., via packet padding) and its statistical information. This letter showcases the inadequacy of such countermeasures against machine learning attacks with a dedicated experimental campaign on a real network dataset. Results indicate the need for a major re-engineering to guarantee the suitable protection of commercially available smart speakers.

Luca Verderame, Davide Caputo, Andrea Romdhana et al.

Access to privacy-sensitive information on Android is a growing concern in the mobile community. Albeit Google Play recently introduced some privacy guidelines, it is still an open problem to soundly verify whether apps actually comply with such rules. To this aim, in this paper, we discuss a novel methodology based on a fruitful combination of static analysis, dynamic analysis, and machine learning techniques, which allows assessing such compliance. More in detail, our methodology checks whether each app i) contains a privacy policy that complies with the Google Play privacy guidelines, and ii) accesses privacy-sensitive information only upon the acceptance of the policy by the user. Furthermore, the methodology also allows checking the compliance of third-party libraries embedded in the apps w.r.t. the same privacy guidelines. We implemented our methodology in a tool, 3PDroid, and we carried out an assessment on a set of recent and most-downloaded Android apps in the Google Play Store. Experimental results suggest that more than 95% of apps access user's privacy-sensitive information, but just a negligible subset of them (around 1%) fully complies with the Google Play privacy guidelines.