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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ALchemist: Fusing Application and Audit Logs for Precise Attack...

Le Yu (Purdue University), Shiqing Ma (Rutgers University), Zhuo Zhang (Purdue University), Guanhong Tao (Purdue University), Xiangyu Zhang (Purdue University), Dongyan Xu (Purdue University), Vincent E. Urias (Sandia National Laboratories), Han Wei Lin (Sandia National Laboratories), Gabriela Ciocarlie (SRI International), Vinod Yegneswaran (SRI International), Ashish Gehani (SRI International)

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Practical Blind Membership Inference Attack via Differential Comparisons

Bo Hui (The Johns Hopkins University), Yuchen Yang (The Johns Hopkins University), Haolin Yuan (The Johns Hopkins University), Philippe Burlina (The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory), Neil Zhenqiang Gong (Duke University), Yinzhi Cao (The Johns Hopkins University)

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Hashomer – Privacy-Preserving Bluetooth Based Contact Tracing Scheme for...

Benny Pinkas (Bar-Ilan University); Eyal Ronen (Tel Aviv University)

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