Comprehensive Detection of Vulnerable Personal Information Leaks in Android Applications

Privacy is important and valued by individuals in our society. However, the wide use of the Internet and networked applications has introduced new complexities to how privacy can be maintained. Many notorious mobile applications have taken away user privacy by transmitting personal information without users' awareness. In this paper, we introduce VULPIX, an approach towards comprehensive detection of privacy leaks in Android mobile applications. We define a comprehensive list of data elements that are considered to be personal information and evaluate the comprehensiveness of detecting leaked personal information on a set of Android applications.