Subscribe to the gold package and get unlimited access to Shamra Academy
Register a new userAn Empirical Assessment of Security Risks of Global Android Banking Apps
106
0
0.0
(
0
)
Added by
Sen Chen
Publication date
2018
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
Ask ChatGPT about the research
No Arabic abstract
Mobile banking apps, belonging to the most security-critical app category, render massive and dynamic transactions susceptible to security risks. Given huge potential financial loss caused by vulnerabilities, existing research lacks a comprehensive empirical study on the security risks of global banking apps to provide useful insights and improve the security of banking apps. Since data-related weaknesses in banking apps are critical and may directly cause serious financial loss, this paper first revisits the state-of-the-art available tools and finds that they have limited capability in identifying data-related security weaknesses of banking apps. To complement the capability of existing tools in data-related weakness detection, we propose a three-phase automated security risk assessment system, named AUSERA, which leverages static program analysis techniques and sensitive keyword identification. By leveraging AUSERA, we collect 2,157 weaknesses in 693 real-world banking apps across 83 countries, which we use as a basis to conduct a comprehensive empirical study from different aspects, such as global distribution and weakness evolution during version updates. We find that apps owned by subsidiary banks are always less secure than or equivalent to those owned by parent banks. In addition, we also track the patching of weaknesses and receive much positive feedback from banking entities so as to improve the security of banking apps in practice. To date, we highlight that 21 banks have confirmed the weaknesses we reported. We also exchange insights with 7 banks, such as HSBC in UK and OCBC in Singapore, via in-person or online meetings to help them improve their apps. We hope that the insights developed in this paper will inform the communities about the gaps among multiple stakeholders, including banks, academic researchers, and third-party security companies.
rate research
Read More
Third-party security apps are an integral part of the Android app ecosystem. Many users install them as an extra layer of protection for their devices. There are hundreds of such security apps, both free and paid in Google Play Store and some of them are downloaded millions of times. By installing security apps, the smartphone users place a significant amount of trust towards the security companies who developed these apps, because a fully functional mobile security app requires access to many smartphone resources such as the storage, text messages and email, browser history, and information about other installed applications. Often these resources contain highly sensitive personal information. As such, it is essential to understand the mobile security apps ecosystem to assess whether is it indeed beneficial to install them. To this end, in this paper, we present the first empirical study of Android security apps. We analyse 100 Android security apps from multiple aspects such as metadata, static analysis, and dynamic analysis and presents insights to their operations and behaviours. Our results show that 20% of the security apps we studied potentially resell the data they collect from smartphones to third parties; in some cases, even without the user consent. Also, our experiments show that around 50% of the security apps fail to identify malware installed on a smartphone.
Limited by the small keyboard, most mobile apps support the automatic login feature for better user experience. Therefore, users avoid the inconvenience of retyping their ID and password when an app runs in the foreground again. However, this auto-login function can be exploited to launch the so-called data-clone attack: once the locally-stored, auto-login depended data are cloned by attackers and placed into their own smartphones, attackers can break through the login-device number limit and log in to the victims account stealthily. A natural countermeasure is to check the consistency of devicespecific attributes. As long as the new device shows different device fingerprints with the previous one, the app will disable the auto-login function and thus prevent data-clone attacks. In this paper, we develop VPDroid, a transparent Android OS-level virtualization platform tailored for security testing. With VPDroid, security analysts can customize different device artifacts, such as CPU model, Android ID, and phone number, in a virtual phone without user-level API hooking. VPDroids isolation mechanism ensures that user-mode apps in the virtual phone cannot detect device-specific discrepancies. To assess Android apps susceptibility to the data-clone attack, we use VPDroid to simulate data-clone attacks with 234 most-downloaded apps. Our experiments on five different virtual phone environments show that VPDroids device attribute customization can deceive all tested apps that perform device-consistency checks, such as Twitter, WeChat, and PayPal. 19 vendors have confirmed our report as a zero-day vulnerability. Our findings paint a cautionary tale: only enforcing a device-consistency check at client side is still vulnerable to an advanced data-clone attack.
Mobile health applications (mHealth apps for short) are being increasingly adopted in the healthcare sector, enabling stakeholders such as governments, health units, medics, and patients, to utilize health services in a pervasive manner. Despite having several known benefits, mHealth apps entail significant security and privacy challenges that can lead to data breaches with serious social, legal, and financial consequences. This research presents an empirical investigation about security awareness of end-users of mHealth apps that are available on major mobile platforms, including Android and iOS. We collaborated with two mHealth providers in Saudi Arabia to survey 101 end-users, investigating their security awareness about (i) existing and desired security features, (ii) security related issues, and (iii) methods to improve security knowledge. Findings indicate that majority of the end-users are aware of the existing security features provided by the apps (e.g., restricted app permissions); however, they desire usable security (e.g., biometric authentication) and are concerned about privacy of their health information (e.g., data anonymization). End-users suggested that protocols such as session timeout or Two-factor authentication (2FA) positively impact security but compromise usability of the app. Security-awareness via social media, peer guidance, or training from app providers can increase end-users trust in mHealth apps. This research investigates human-centric knowledge based on empirical evidence and provides a set of guidelines to develop secure and usable mHealth apps.
Android users are increasingly concerned with the privacy of their data and security of their devices. To improve the security awareness of users, recent automatic techniques produce security-centric descriptions by performing program analysis. However, the generated text does not always address users concerns as they are generally too technical to be understood by ordinary users. Moreover, different users have varied linguistic preferences, which do not match the text. Motivated by this challenge, we develop an innovative scheme to help users avoid malware and privacy-breaching apps by generating security descriptions that explain the privacy and security related aspects of an Android app in clear and understandable terms. We implement a prototype system, PERSCRIPTION, to generate personalised security-centric descriptions that automatically learn users security concerns and linguistic preferences to produce user-oriented descriptions. We evaluate our scheme through experiments and user studies. The results clearly demonstrate the improvement on readability and users security awareness of PERSCRIPTIONs descriptions compared to existing description generators.
The purpose of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is to provide improved privacy protection. If an app controls personal data from users, it needs to be compliant with GDPR. However, GDPR lists general rules rather than exact step-by-step guidelines about how to develop an app that fulfills the requirements. Therefore, there may exist GDPR compliance violations in existing apps, which would pose severe privacy threats to app users. In this paper, we take mobile health applications (mHealth apps) as a peephole to examine the status quo of GDPR compliance in Android apps. We first propose an automated system, named mytool, to bridge the semantic gap between the general rules of GDPR and the app implementations by identifying the data practices declared in the app privacy policy and the data relevant behaviors in the app code. Then, based on mytool, we detect three kinds of GDPR compliance violations, including the incompleteness of privacy policy, the inconsistency of data collections, and the insecurity of data transmission. We perform an empirical evaluation of 796 mHealth apps. The results reveal that 189 (23.7%) of them do not provide complete privacy policies. Moreover, 59 apps collect sensitive data through different measures, but 46 (77.9%) of them contain at least one inconsistent collection behavior. Even worse, among the 59 apps, only 8 apps try to ensure the transmission security of collected data. However, all of them contain at least one encryption or SSL misuse. Our work exposes severe privacy issues to raise awareness of privacy protection for app users and developers.
Log in to be able to interact and post comments
comments
Fetching comments
Sign in to be able to follow your search criteria
