Research Article
Evaluation of Cryptography Usage in Android Applications
@ARTICLE{10.4108/eai.3-12-2015.2262471, author={Alexia Chatzikonstantinou and Christoforos Ntantogian and Georgios Karopoulos and Christos Xenakis}, title={Evaluation of Cryptography Usage in Android Applications}, journal={EAI Endorsed Transactions on Security and Safety}, volume={3}, number={9}, publisher={ACM}, journal_a={SESA}, year={2016}, month={5}, keywords={software security, android, cryptography misuse}, doi={10.4108/eai.3-12-2015.2262471} }- Alexia Chatzikonstantinou
Christoforos Ntantogian
Georgios Karopoulos
Christos Xenakis
Year: 2016
Evaluation of Cryptography Usage in Android Applications
SESA
EAI
DOI: 10.4108/eai.3-12-2015.2262471
Abstract
Mobile application developers are using cryptography in their products to protect sensitive data like passwords, short messages, documents etc. In this paper, we study whether cryptography and related techniques are employed in a proper way, in order to protect these private data. To this end, we downloaded 49 Android applications from the Google Play marketplace and performed static and dynamic analysis in an attempt to detect possible cryptographic misuses. The results showed that 87.8% of the applications present some kind of misuse, while for the rest of them no cryptography usage was detected during the analysis. Finally, we suggest countermeasures, mainly intended for developers, to alleviate the issues identified by the analysis.
Copyright © 2015 C. Ntantogian et al., licensed to EAI. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unlimited use, distribution and reproduction in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited.