Experimental Analysis of Popular Smartphone Apps Offering Anonymity, Ephemerality, and End-to-End Encryption

Abstract

As social networking takes to the mobile world, smartphone apps provide users with ever-changing ways to interact with each other. Over the past couple of years, an increasing number of apps have entered the market offering end-to-end encryption, self-destructing messages, or some degree of anonymity. However, little work thus far has examined the properties they offer. To this end, this paper presents a taxonomy of 18 of these apps: we first look at the features they promise in their appeal to broaden their reach and focus on 8 of the more popular ones. We present a technical evaluation, based on static and dynamic analysis, and identify a number of gaps between the claims and reality of their promises.

arXiv commentA preliminary version of this paper appears in the Proceedings of the 2016 NDSS Workshop on Understanding and Enhancing Online Privacy (UEOP). This is the full version