Identifying Problematic Children Apps
Smartphones and their ability to run virtually any application (app) present many parents with major challenges in terms of which apps are suitable for their children. For this reason, quality labels (“Family”, 5+, etc.) have been introduced to enable parents to identify apps that do not violate their children’s privacy. Unfortunately, however, it has been shown that time and again apps make it into the major app stores that track children inappropriately despite being labeled accordingly. The aim of this project is to enable better detection of such apps by means of automated analysis of software behavior and thus restore trust in the seals of approval.
However, many of these apps rely on mechanisms that make analysis more difficult. For example, the original code is obfuscated in such a way that the names in the code, which indicate the functionality of the application, are replaced by incomprehensible character strings. In order to analyze the behavior, we will apply the latest research results that allow us to identify the original code and thus facilitate the analysis. Based on this, it will be easier to determine whether children are being tracked inappropriately (e.g. GPS location, communication data) or whether the child is being presented with content that is not age-appropriate.
https://www.cysec.tu-darmstadt.de/cysec/newsarchive/details_129538.de.jsp
https://blog.research.google/2018/03/google-faculty-research-awards-2017.html