Betrayed by the Guardian: Security and Privacy Risks of Parental Control Solutions
This research addresses critical security and privacy risks for children and parents who rely on parental control solutions, highlighting how these tools, despite their protective intent, can become vectors for harm.
This paper investigates security and privacy vulnerabilities in parental control solutions across various platforms, including network devices, Windows applications, Chrome extensions, and Android apps. The study reveals widespread security and privacy issues that could result in private information leakage or allow adversaries to fully control the parental control solution, potentially facilitating cyberbullying and cyber predation.
For parents of young children and adolescents, the digital age has introduced many new challenges, including excessive screen time, inappropriate online content, cyber predators, and cyberbullying. To address these challenges, many parents rely on numerous parental control solutions on different platforms, including parental control network devices (e.g., WiFi routers) and software applications on mobile devices and laptops. While these parental control solutions may help digital parenting, they may also introduce serious security and privacy risks to children and parents, due to their elevated privileges and having access to a significant amount of privacy-sensitive data. In this paper, we present an experimental framework for systematically evaluating security and privacy issues in parental control software and hardware solutions. Using the developed framework, we provide the first comprehensive study of parental control tools on multiple platforms including network devices, Windows applications, Chrome extensions and Android apps. Our analysis uncovers pervasive security and privacy issues that can lead to leakage of private information, and/or allow an adversary to fully control the parental control solution, and thereby may directly aid cyberbullying and cyber predators.