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  4. HideMyApp : Hiding the Presence of Sensitive Apps on Android
 
conference paper

HideMyApp : Hiding the Presence of Sensitive Apps on Android

Anh Pham
•
Dacosta, Italo  
•
Losiouk, Eleonora
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January 1, 2019
Proceedings Of The 28Th Usenix Security Symposium
28th USENIX Security Symposium

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.

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Type
conference paper
Web of Science ID

WOS:000509775000041

Author(s)
Anh Pham
Dacosta, Italo  
Losiouk, Eleonora
Stephan, John  
Huguenin, Kevin
Hubaux, Jean-Pierre  
Date Issued

2019-01-01

Publisher

USENIX ASSOC

Publisher place

Berkeley

Published in
Proceedings Of The 28Th Usenix Security Symposium
ISBN of the book

978-1-939133-06-9

Start page

711

End page

728

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
LDS  
Event nameEvent placeEvent date
28th USENIX Security Symposium

Santa Clara, CA

Aug 14-16, 2019

Available on Infoscience
February 20, 2020
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/166388
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