Collect Responsibly But Deliver Arbitrarily?: A Study on Cross-User Privacy Leakage in Mobile Apps

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed the interesting trend that modern mobile apps perform more and more likely as user-to-user platforms, where app users can be freely and conveniently connected. Upon these platforms, rich and diverse data is often delivered across users, which brings users great conveniences and plentiful services, but also introduces privacy security concerns. While prior work has primarily studied illegitimate personal data collection problems in mobile apps, few paid little attention to the security of this emerging user-to-user platform feature, thus providing a rather limited understanding of the privacy risks in this aspect. In this paper, we focus on the security of the user-to-user platform feature and shed light on its caused insufficiently-studied but critical privacy risk, which is brought forward by cross-user personal data over-delivery (denoted as XPO). For the first time, this paper reveals the landscape of such XPO risk in wild, along with prevalence and severity assessment. To achieve this, we design a novel automated risk detection framework, named XPOChecker, that leverages the advantages of machine learning and program analysis to extensively and precisely identify potential privacy risks during user-to-user connections, and regulate whether the delivered data is legitimate or not. By applying XPOChecker on 13,820 real-world popular Android apps, we find that XPO is prevalent in practice, with 1,902 apps (13.76%) being affected. In addition to the mere exposure of diverse private user data which causes serious and broad privacy infringement, we demonstrate that the XPO exploits can invalidate privacy preservation mechanisms, leak business secrets, and even restore the sensitive membership of victims which potentially poses personal safety threats. Furthermore, we also confirm the existence of XPO risks in iOS apps for the first time. Last, to help understand and prevent XPO, we have responsibly launched two notification campaigns to inform the developers of the affected apps, with the conclusion of five underlying lessons from developers' feedback. We hope our work can make up for the deficiency of the understandings of XPO, help developers avoid XPO, and motivate further researches.