Speaker: Gail-Joon Ahn

Title: Understanding and Mitigation of Risks in Mobile Applications

Abstract:

More than half of adult Americans own a smartphone and sales are expected to exceed PC sales in the near future. Mobile operating systems allow third-party developers to create applications (apps). The onus is placed on the owner to evaluate, before an app is installed, the security and privacy implications of installing an app, using only the description and the permissions requested. For the average smartphone owner this information is not enough to make an informed decision. Power must be returned to smartphone owners. We have investigated various approaches to automatically generate app intelligence to empower owners to evaluate the security and privacy implications of installing and running an app. This talk overviews our approaches and results that show how we could create such intelligence.