Joel Reardon

Debjyoti Mukherjee, Alireza Ahmadi, Maryam Vahdat Pour et al.

Application markets provide a communication channel between app developers and their end-users in form of app reviews, which allow users to provide feedback about the apps. Although security and privacy in mobile apps are one of the biggest issues, it is unclear how much people are aware of these or discuss them in reviews. In this study, we explore the privacy and security concerns of users using reviews in the Google Play Store. For this, we conducted a study by analyzing around 2.2M reviews from the top 539 apps of this Android market. We found that 0.5\% of these reviews are related to the security and privacy concerns of the users. We further investigated these apps by performing dynamic analysis which provided us valuable insights into their actual behaviors. Based on the different perspectives, we categorized the apps and evaluated how the different factors influence the users' perception of the apps. It was evident from the results that the number of permissions that the apps request plays a dominant role in this matter. We also found that sending out the location can affect the users' thoughts about the app. The other factors do not directly affect the privacy and security concerns for the users.

Paul-Olivier Dehaye, Joel Reardon

Ahead of the rollout of the SwissCovid contact tracing app, an official public security test was performed. During this audit, Prof. Serge Vaudenay and Dr. Martin Vuagnoux described a large set of problems with the app, including a new variation of a known false-positive attack, leveraging a cryptographic weakness in the Google and Apple Exposure Notification framework to tamper with the emitted Bluetooth beacons. Separately, the first author described a re-identification attack leveraging rogue apps or SDKs. The response from the Swiss cybersecurity agency and the Swiss public health authority was to claim these various attacks were unlikely as they required physical proximity of the attacker with the target (although it was admitted the attacker could be further than two meters). The physical presence of the attacker in Switzerland was deemed significant as it would imply such attackers would fall under the Swiss Criminal Code. We show through one example that a much larger variety of adversaries must be considered in the scenarios originally described and that these attacks can be done by adversaries without any physical presence in Switzerland. This goes directly against official findings of Swiss public authorities evaluating the risks associated with SwissCovid. To move the discussion further along, we briefly discuss the growth of the attack surface and harms with COVID-19 and SwissCovid prevalence in the population. While the focus of this article is on Switzerland, we emphasize the core technical findings and cybersecurity concerns are of relevance to many contact tracing efforts.

Primal Wijesekera, Arjun Baokar, Lynn Tsai et al.

Current smartphone operating systems regulate application permissions by prompting users on an ask-on-first-use basis. Prior research has shown that this method is ineffective because it fails to account for context: the circumstances under which an application first requests access to data may be vastly different than the circumstances under which it subsequently requests access. We performed a longitudinal 131-person field study to analyze the contextuality behind user privacy decisions to regulate access to sensitive resources. We built a classifier to make privacy decisions on the user's behalf by detecting when context has changed and, when necessary, inferring privacy preferences based on the user's past decisions and behavior. Our goal is to automatically grant appropriate resource requests without further user intervention, deny inappropriate requests, and only prompt the user when the system is uncertain of the user's preferences. We show that our approach can accurately predict users' privacy decisions 96.8% of the time, which is a four-fold reduction in error rate compared to current systems.