HUNTDROID (Protect your Personal Information)

Abstract

With the great usage of smartphones, millions of mobile Applications are being developed to provide rich functionality for users by accessing certain Personally Identifiable Information (PII), causing serious privacy concerns. Many ways to detect privacy disclosures in Android Applications have been developed to address this challenge, however they all fail to automatically decide if the privacy disclosures are occurring through an Application or not. As a result, while using such methodologies for Application analysis, security analysts may encounter a lot of false positives. HUNTDROID is an analysis system, comprised of an Android Application, that tries to automatically identify privacy breaches by determining whether an Android Application is leaking user’s personal information or not. Any Android Application, if shares personal information of the user, falls under the category of privacy disclosure. Given that most mobile Applications are really web Applications, and most of them communicate in an unsecured fashion, such information disclosure is significant and can be pervasive.