Abstract:
The Information age has ushered in a new era of advancement and facilitation for human
civilization. For entertainment and leisure, Vacation rental applications are a go-to for
reserving rooms in hotels in distant areas. These applications have brought extraordinary
convenience to users who can bypass agents and their commissions. However, this convenience
comes at a cost. The data exchanged and stored by these applications can be exploited to act as
a threat to Personal Identifiable Information (PII). These applications store not only PII but
also transaction details as well as other sensitive information like hotels that were reserved on
a particular date. This data can be used by Hackers for malicious purposes. On the other hand,
it can be utilized by Forensics experts to dig down and obtain useful results. This research is
focused on performing a security analysis of user privacy in vacation rental applications and
gaining a better insight to improve the security posture of such applications.
