Privacy Capsules
@ MPI-SWS

Motivation

With digital distribution platforms (for instance, Google Play and Apple iTunes), users can choose 3th party applications among thousand options. However, many of these applications send/receive data to/from their remote service. The user might not have control over the data that is shared with the service provider. In some cases, the user does not even know about that.

As example, consider the Twitter mobile application. During the installation, it requires the permission to access both Internet and the user's contact list. However, it was noticed that the application secretly uploaded data from the contact list to the Twitter servers (see this for more information). After such episode became public, they changed the application to notify the user about the data sharing.

Our Solution

This project aims to provide solutions to prevent information leakage from 3th party applications by controlling the flow of information.

We propose an architectural solution based on a two-stage execution environment. In this solution, the application has two sequential states: unsealed (the initial state) and sealed (the final state). Once the application has changed to the sealed state, it can terminate but not go back to the unsealed state. The main idea is that the application has access to sensitive information (or generate sensitive information) only in the sealed mode, and it can communicate with 3th parties only in the unsealed mode.

All the data access is mediated by a trusted component like the kernel. In addition:

• Unsealed mode - the application has no access to the user's private input (for example, the exact location, contacts details) or sensors (also considered as sensitive information), for example. However, the application has access to any other stream (files or network connections);
• Sealed mode - the application has access to sensitive information and to encrypted information stored in previous sealed mode executions.

Publications

• Privacy Capsules: Preventing information leaks by mobile apps

  Raul Herbster, Scott DellaTorre, Peter Druschel, Bobby Bhattacharjee,
  Paper ACM MobiSys'16, June 2016.

Code and Guides

• Code

  GIT repository

• Documentation

  Developer's Guide.

Current Members

External members

Funding