Amogh Pradeep, Álvaro Feal, Julien Gamba, Ashwin Rao, Martina Lindorfer, Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez, David Choffnes
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引用次数: 1
摘要
移动浏览器的透明度和隐私行为在研究界仍然广泛未被探索。事实上,与常规的Android应用程序相反,移动浏览器可能会呈现出与隐私行为相矛盾的行为。一方面,他们可以访问(并可以公开)敏感用户数据的唯一组合,从用户的浏览历史记录到受权限保护的个人身份信息(PII),如唯一标识符和地理位置。然而,在另一方面,他们也处于一个独特的位置,通过实施广告拦截功能来限制与其他方的数据共享,从而保护用户的隐私。在本文中,我们对数百个Android web浏览器如何在浏览会话期间保护或暴露用户数据进行了比较和实证分析。为此,我们从Google Play Store和四个中国应用商店收集了迄今为止最大的Android浏览器数据集。然后,我们开发了一种新的分析管道,结合了静态和动态分析方法,以发现各种各样的隐私增强(例如,广告拦截)和隐私损害行为(例如,将浏览历史记录发送给第三方,不验证TLS证书,以及向第三方暴露PII-包括不可重置的标识符)。我们发现Google Play和中国商店中的各种流行应用程序都有这些侵犯隐私的行为,包括在其描述中声称增强隐私的应用程序。总的来说,我们的研究不仅为浏览器的采用和透明度提供了重要但被忽视的考虑因素,而且还提供了自动应用分析系统(例如沙箱)需要特定于上下文的分析来揭示此类隐私行为。
Not Your Average App: A Large-scale Privacy Analysis of Android Browsers
The transparency and privacy behavior of mobile browsers has remained widely unexplored by the research community. In fact, as opposed to regular Android apps, mobile browsers may present contradicting privacy behaviors. On the one end, they can have access to (and can expose) a unique combination of sensitive user data, from users’ browsing history to permission-protected personally identifiable information (PII) such as unique identifiers and geolocation. However, on the other end, they also are in a unique position to protect users’ privacy by limiting data sharing with other parties by implementing ad-blocking features. In this paper, we perform a comparative and empirical analysis on how hundreds of Android web browsers protect or expose user data during browsing sessions. To this end, we collect the largest dataset of Android browsers to date, from the Google Play Store and four Chinese app stores. Then, we developed a novel analysis pipeline that combines static and dynamic analysis methods to find a wide range of privacy-enhancing (e.g., ad-blocking) and privacy-harming behaviors (e.g., sending browsing histories to third parties, not validating TLS certificates, and exposing PII---including non-resettable identifiers---to third parties) across browsers. We find that various popular apps on both Google Play and Chinese stores have these privacy-harming behaviors, including apps that claim to be privacy-enhancing in their descriptions. Overall, our study not only provides new insights into important yet overlooked considerations for browsers’ adoption and transparency, but also that automatic app analysis systems (e.g., sandboxes) need context-specific analysis to reveal such privacy behaviors.