Android Password Managers and Vault Applications: Comparative Security Analysis

An application defining itself as a password management / vault software should be built upon a strong security architecture ensuring a much higher level of data security compared to a regular general-purpose application. To check how secure the popular Android password managers / vault applications are, the authors analyze at high-level four of them from a security perspective, based on the public knowledge about their security that is available from their official documentations, their source code or can be revealed by an observation of their runtime behavior. To accomplish this, the authors suggest a number of security evaluation criteria grouped into three security evaluation criteria sets and use them to guide the security analysis process.