LinkDroid: reducing unregulated aggregation of app usage behaviors

摘要: Usage behaviors of different smartphone apps capture views an individual's life, and are largely independent each other. However, in the current mobile app ecosystem, a curious party can covertly link aggregate usage same user across apps. We refer to this as unregulated aggregation appusage behaviors. In paper, we present fresh perspective aggregation, focusing on monitoring, characterizing reducing underlying linkability The cornerstone our study is Dynamic Linkability Graph (DLG) which tracks applevel during runtime. observed how DLG evolves real-world users identified evidence abusing IPCs OS-level identifying information establish linkability. Based these observations, propose linkability-aware extension current-mobile operating systems, called LinkDroid, provides runtime monitoring mediation LinkDroid client-side solution compatible with existing ecosystem. It helps end-users "sense" emerging threat them intuitive opt-out options.