Yun Shen (NortonLifeLock Research Group), Pierre-Antoine Vervier (NortonLifeLock Research Group), Gianluca Stringhini (Boston University)

Mobile phones enable the collection of a wealth of private information, from unique identifiers (e.g., email addresses), to a user’s location, to their text messages. This information can be harvested by apps and sent to third parties, which can use it for a variety of purposes. In this paper we perform the largest study of private information collection (PIC) on Android to date. Leveraging an anonymized dataset collected from the customers of a popular mobile security product, we analyze the flows of sensitive information generated by 2.1M unique apps installed by 17.3M users over a period of 21 months between 2018 and 2019. We find that 87.2% of all devices send private information to at least five different domains, and that actors active in different regions (e.g., Asia compared to Europe) are interested in collecting different types of information. The United States (62% of the total) and China (7% of total flows) are the countries that collect most private information. Our findings raise issues regarding data regulation, and would encourage policymakers to further regulate how private information is used by and shared among the companies and how accountability can be truly guaranteed.

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Sn4ke: Practical Mutation Analysis of Tests at Binary Level

Mohsen Ahmadi (Arizona State University), Pantea Kiaei (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), Navid Emamdoost (University of Minnesota)

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Tales of Favicons and Caches: Persistent Tracking in Modern...

Konstantinos Solomos (University of Illinois at Chicago), John Kristoff (University of Illinois at Chicago), Chris Kanich (University of Illinois at Chicago), Jason Polakis (University of Illinois at Chicago)

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LaKSA: A Probabilistic Proof-of-Stake Protocol

Daniel Reijsbergen (Singapore University of Technology and Design), Pawel Szalachowski (Singapore University of Technology and Design), Junming Ke (University of Tartu), Zengpeng Li (Singapore University of Technology and Design), Jianying Zhou (Singapore University of Technology and Design)

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Demo #3: Detecting Illicit Drone Video Filming Using Cryptanalysis

Ben Nassi, Raz Ben-Netanel (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev), Adi Shamir (Weizmann Institute of Science), and Yuval Elovic (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)

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