The App Genome Project
This week at the Black Hat Security Conference, Lookout will unveil the App Genome Project, which is the largest mobile application dataset ever created. In an ongoing effort to map and study mobile applications, the App Genome Project was created to identify security threats in the wild and provide insight into how applications are accessing personal data, as well as other phone resources. Lookout founders John Hering and Kevin Mahaffey initiated the App Genome project to understand what mobile applications are doing and use that information to more quickly identify potential security threats.
Early Findings
Early findings show differences in the sensitive data that is being accessed by Android and iPhone applications, as well as a proliferation of third party code in applications across both platforms. Stats include:
29% of free applications on Android have the capability to access a user’s location, compared with 33% of free applications on iPhone
Nearly twice as many free applications have the capability to access user’s contact data on iPhone (14%) as compared to Android (8%)
47% of free Android apps include third party code, while that number is 23% on iPhone*
* Examples of third party code includes code that enables mobile ads to be served and analytic tracking for developers.
Also warte ich lieber, genauso wie saw.
