As the usage of mobile application continues to increase, users might just be losing out on various personal details which could cause security issues later. The Lookout blog states that the company plans to release the App Genome Project at the upcoming Black Hat Security Conference. The project is touted to be the ‘largest’ mobile app dataset built until now. The company plans to record and evaluate apps through this project. It has been crafted in order to track down security threats and understand how the software can obtain personal data and other phone resources.
John Hering and Kevin Mahaffey the founders of Lookout instigated the App Genome project to comprehend the way these apps function and make use of data. By doing this they can effectively classify probable security threats. Some of their initial reports portray the different ways Android and iPhone applications accessed sensitive data. Additionally the diversity in the proliferation of a third party code featured in apps on both the platforms.
On the iPhone platform around 33 percent of the free apps can obtain the user’s location, whereas 29 percent can access it on Android. On the iPhone 23 percent free apps embed a third party code while 47 percent Android apps integrate them. Contact details can be obtained by around 8 percent on Android, which is half of the number of apps on iPhone accounting to 14 percent.
The company’s future plan is to elucidate on new security vulnerabilities one of which is Mobile Data Leakage. The latter is described as a sort of vulnerability where if publishers are not careful while using the data they might unintentionally expose it to apps which can misuse it. Android apps had faced this problem nevertheless Google has now fixed it in all Android versions.
End users need to be extremely careful when they enable these apps to access private information. At the same time developers need to be vigilant as they transmit, access and archive the user’s data. The company intends to discuss these matters in detail at the conference.