ANALYZING SECURITY BREACH AND DATA LEAKAGE IN MOBILE APPLICATIONS USING ILLEGITIMATE SERVER CONNECTIONS

Abstract

In past few years, an incredible increase is measured in the popularity and pervasiveness of android smart phones. Also it has observed that new mobile applications are built almost everyday. These apps provides functionalities such as social networking, games, and a lot more to users. A few of the mobile applications have a direct purchasing cost or may be freely available but having an ad-support in it for the revenue and in return these applications provides user’s private/confidential data to the ad providers without letting the users consent. Worryingly, most of ad libraries ask for the permissions beyond their requirement and sometimes additional ones from that are listed in their documentation. Some apps also track their users with a network sniffer across ad providers and its applications. Though for security point in concern, users have full right to know that if someone is taking his/her private data or information. This is often ineffective at conveying meaningful, useful information on how a user’s privacy might be impacted by using an application. In this research work, the effect on user privacy of some grossing Android apps was examined that includes apps which provide private data of user without their permission. Android device is firstly rooted for this work and then made some useful changes to collect the required traffic from different applications. On basis of certain parameters, traffic is analyzed and effective results concluded. Using third party connections that an app makes, a threshold is defined to know about legitimacy of application. Some other parameters were also added to check whether an app is stealing users’ private information.