Search for: All records

Data privacy, a critical human right, is gaining importance as new technologies are developed, and the old ones evolve. In mobile platforms such as Android, data privacy regulations require developers to communicate data access requests using privacy policy statements (PPS). This case study cross-examines the PPS in popular social media (SM) apps---Facebook and Twitter---for features of language ambiguity, sensitive data requests, and whether the statements tally with the data requests made in the Manifest file. Subsequently, we conduct a comparative analysis between the PPS of these two apps to examine trends that may constitute a threat to user data privacy. 

As data privacy continues to be a crucial human-right concern as recognized by the UN, regulatory agencies have demanded developers obtain user permission before accessing user-sensitive data. Mainly through the use of privacy policies statements, developers fulfill their legal requirements to keep users abreast of the requests for their data. In addition, platforms such as Android enforces explicit permission request using the permission model. Nonetheless, recent research has shown that service providers hardly make full disclosure when requesting data in these statements. Neither is the current permission model designed to provide adequate informed consent. Often users have no clear understanding of the reason and scope of usage of the data request. This paper proposes an unambiguous, informed consent process that provides developers with a standardized method for declaring Intent. Our proposed Intent-aware permission architecture extends the current Android permission model with a precise mechanism for full disclosure of purpose and scope limitation. The design of which is based on an ontology study of data requests purposes. The overarching objective of this model is to ensure end-users are adequately informed before making decisions on their data. Additionally, this model has the potential to improve trust between end-users and developers. 

Memory Forensics is one of the most important emerging areas in computer forensics. In memory forensics, analysis of userland memory is a technique that analyses per-process runtime data structures and extracts significant evidence for application-specific investigations. In this research, our focus is to examine the critical challenges faced by process memory acquisition that can impact object and data recovery. Particularly, this research work seeks to address the issues of consistency and reliability in userland memory forensics on Android. In real-world investigations, memory acquisition tools record the information when the device is running. In such scenarios, each application’s memory content may be in flux due to updates that are in progress, garbage collection activities, changes in process states, etc. In this paper we focus on various runtime activities such as garbage collection and process states and the impact they have on object recovery in userland memory forensics. The outcome of the research objective is to assess the reliability of Android userland memory forensic tools by providing new research directions for efficiently developing a metric study to measure the reliability. We evaluated our research objective by analysing memory dumps acquired from 30 apps in different Process Acquisition Modes. The Process Acquisition Mode (PAM) is the memory dump of a process that is extracted while external runtime factors are triggered. Our research identified an inconsistency in the number of objects recovered from analysing the process memory dumps with runtime factors included. Particularly, the evaluation results revealed differences in the count of objects recovered in different acquisition modes. We utilized Euclidean distance and covariance as the metrics for our study. These two metrics enabled the authors to identify how the change in the number of recovered objects in PAM impact forensic analysis. Our conclusion revealed that runtime factors could on average result in about 20% data loss, thus revealing these factors can have an obvious impact on object recovery.