Google Play Store provides thousands of applications for monitoring your children/family members. Since these apps deal with highly sensitive information, they immediately raise questions on privacy and security. Who else can track the users? Is this data properly protected? To answer these questions, we analyzed a selection of the most popular tracking apps from the Google Play Store.
Many apps and services suffer from grave security issues. Some apps use self-made algorithms instead of proper cryptography for data storage and transmission. Others do not even attempt to protect their communication at all and make use of the unprotected http protocol, or even give an attacker full access to a vulnerable backend system. Hard coded database credentials in apps allowed access to all stored user locations. We would be able to extract hundreds of thousands of tracking profiles, even in real time. In others, this wasn't even necessary, because the user authentication could be bypassed altogether. Flaws in server API allowed us to extract all user credentials (1.7m plain text passwords), further we saw full communication histories containing messages, pictures and location data.
In total, the state of tracker apps is worrisome, effectively leading to users unknowingly installing espionage software on their devices.
Siegfried is the head of department Secure Software Engineering at Fraunhofer SIT (Germany) and his main research focus is on applied software security. He has received a PhD, master's degree and bachelor's degree in computer science and IT-security. He is the founder of the CodeInspect reverse engineering tool and founded TeamSIK. During his research, he develops tools that combine static and dynamic code analysis for security purposes. Most of his research is published at top tier academic conferences and industry conferences like DEF CON, BlackHat, AVAR or VirusBulletin.
Stephan is a security researcher at the Testlab mobile security group at the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology (SIT). His main focus is Android application security testing and developing new static and dynamic analysis techniques for app security evaluation. He found different vulnerabilities in well-known Android applications and the AOSP. He gave talks on conferences like DEF CON, HITB, AppSec or VirusBulletin. In his spare time he enjoys teaching students in Android hacking.
Steven is currently a researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology (SIT) in Darmstadt. He has received a PhD, a master's degree in computer science, and a master's degree in IT Security from Technische Universität Darmstadt. Steven is one of the core maintainers of the Soot open-source compiler framework that is now used for static analysis and program instrumentation by various research groups around the world. He is also actively maintaining the FLOWDROID open-source static data flow tracker. His main research interests center on (mobile) security and static and dynamic program analysis applied to real-world security problems, an area in which he has published various research papers over the last years.