Repository logo

Infoscience

  • English
  • French
Log In
Logo EPFL, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne

Infoscience

  • English
  • French
Log In
  1. Home
  2. Academic and Research Output
  3. Preprints and Working Papers
  4. HideMyApp: Hiding the Presence of Sensitive Apps on Android
 
working paper

HideMyApp: Hiding the Presence of Sensitive Apps on Android

Pham, Thi Van Anh  
•
Dacosta Petrocelli, Italo Ivan  
•
Losiouk, Eleonora
Show more
2019

Millions of users rely on mobile health (mHealth) apps to manage their wellness and medical conditions. Although the popularity of such apps continues to grow, several privacy and security challenges can hinder their potential. In particular, the simple fact that an mHealth app is installed on a user’s phone can reveal sensitive information about the user’s health. Due to Android’s open design, any app, even without permissions, can easily check for the presence of a specific app or collect the entire list of installed apps on the phone. Our analysis shows that Android apps expose a significant amount of metadata, which facilitates fingerprinting them. Many third parties are interested in such information: Our survey of 2917 popular apps in the Google Play Store shows that around 57% of these apps explicitly query for the list of installed apps. Therefore, we designed and implemented HideMyApp (HMA), an effective and practical solution for hiding the presence of sensitive apps from other apps. HMA does not require any changes to the Android operating system or to apps yet still supports their key functionalities. By using a diverse dataset of both free and paid mHealth apps, our experimental evaluation shows that HMA supports the main functionalities in most apps and introduces acceptable overheads at runtime (i.e., several milliseconds); these findings were validated by our user-study (N=30). In short, we show that the practice of collecting information about installed apps is widespread and that our solution, HMA, provides a robust protection against such a threat.

  • Files
  • Details
  • Metrics
Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Name

sec19-pham.pdf

Type

Publisher's Version

Version

Published version

Access type

openaccess

Size

1.15 MB

Format

Adobe PDF

Checksum (MD5)

726ffda1ee6469684a78c3d79387fa2d

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Name

paper.pdf

Access type

openaccess

Size

1.59 MB

Format

Adobe PDF

Checksum (MD5)

47da234605efa381762c47a965ee26e1

Logo EPFL, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne
  • Contact
  • infoscience@epfl.ch

  • Follow us on Facebook
  • Follow us on Instagram
  • Follow us on LinkedIn
  • Follow us on X
  • Follow us on Youtube
AccessibilityLegal noticePrivacy policyCookie settingsEnd User AgreementGet helpFeedback

Infoscience is a service managed and provided by the Library and IT Services of EPFL. © EPFL, tous droits réservés