MobileAppScrutinator: A Simple yet Efficient Dynamic Analysis Approach for Detecting Privacy Leaks across Mobile OSs
This addresses the need for cross-platform privacy leak detection for smartphone users, though it is incremental as it builds on existing dynamic analysis methods.
The authors tackled the problem of detecting and comparing privacy leaks across mobile operating systems by developing MobileAppScrutinator, a dynamic analysis tool tested on 140 representative apps, revealing that current privacy safeguards on Android and iOS are insufficient.
Smartphones, the devices we carry everywhere with us, are being heavily tracked and have undoubtedly become a major threat to our privacy. As "tracking the trackers" has become a necessity, various static and dynamic analysis tools have been developed in the past. However, today, we still lack suitable tools to detect, measure and compare the ongoing tracking across mobile OSs. To this end, we propose MobileAppScrutinator, based on a simple yet efficient dynamic analysis approach, that works on both Android and iOS (the two most popular OSs today). To demonstrate the current trend in tracking, we select 140 most representative Apps available on both Android and iOS AppStores and test them with MobileAppScrutinator. In fact, choosing the same set of apps on both Android and iOS also enables us to compare the ongoing tracking on these two OSs. Finally, we also discuss the effectiveness of privacy safeguards available on Android and iOS. We show that neither Android nor iOS privacy safeguards in their present state are completely satisfying.