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Security and privacy analysis of mobile apps
Alkhattabi, Khalid
Alkhattabi, Khalid
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2024
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Abstract
Today, there are millions of Android apps available for users, and almost every user in the world interacts with a number of apps on a daily basis. However, users are increasingly concerned about using such mobile apps, due to potential threats to their safety, security, and privacy. For instance, Family Locator (FL) app users are concerned about whether these apps are secure or not. This category of apps is unlike others; FL apps' severity of compromise is high because they are used by groups of users (or family members). In Chapter 2, we conducted a study to investigate FL apps’ security and privacy vulnerabilities, aiming to raise awareness for both users and developers about such vulnerabilities that exist in FL apps. Moreover, users should read a privacy policy before installing an app to be aware if using the app would incur privacy risks. Some users may also resort to using AI-based tools to help them read mobile apps' privacy policies. However, the capabilities of these tools for helping users remain unknown. This motivated me to study and evaluate the capabilities of such tools to provide accurate answers to users' questions about mobile apps’ privacy policies (discussed in Chapter 3). We developed an enhanced QA system, "Our QA System," which builds on the existing model and achieves an improvement of up to 11.18\%. While the findings of these two studies have been useful in examining the relationships between users and the security and privacy of their data, there are open questions about the completeness of privacy policies of mobile apps. Finally, chapter 4 investigates the completeness of mobile apps’ privacy policies. This investigation represents the first step towards enhancing transparency and trust in the use of mobile apps. Hopefully, these studies and their findings can benefit mobile app users with better security and privacy protection.
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