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Smartphone apps may be secretly stealing your data
Smartphone apps that we regularly use to organise lunch dates, make convenient online purchases and communicate the most intimate details are mining our data by secretly colluding with each other, a new study warns. Researchers conducted the first ever large-scale and systematic study of exactly how the trusty apps on Android phones are able to talk to one another and trade information.
Washington: Smartphone apps that we regularly use to organise lunch dates, make convenient online purchases and communicate the most intimate details are mining our data by secretly colluding with each other, a new study warns. Researchers conducted the first ever large-scale and systematic study of exactly how the trusty apps on Android phones are able to talk to one another and trade information.
"Researchers were aware that apps may talk to one another in some way, shape, or form," said Gang Wang, Assistant Professor at Virginia Tech University in the US. "What this study shows undeniably with real-world evidence over and over again is that app behaviour, whether it is intentional or not, can pose a security breach depending on the kinds of apps you have on your phone," said Wang.
The types of threats fall into two major categories, either a malware app that is specifically designed to launch a cyberattack or apps that simply allow for collusion and privilege escalation, researchers said.
In the latter category, it is not possible to quantify the intention of the developer, so collusion, while still a security breach, can in many cases be unintentional, they said. In order to run the programmes to test pairs of apps, the team developed a tool called DIALDroid to perform their massive inter-app security analysis.
