Managing your privacy in mobile applications with MockingBird

Abstract

Mocking is a standard technique in software testing; its main goal is to mimic the real object behavior in a controllable way. Recently, mocking techniques have been used in mobile environments to increase the user privacy and their goal is to allow users to select the kind of information they want to pass to the application (if real or randomly generated). This work presents MockingBird, a novel solution to mocking that uses recorded context-traces instead of randomly generated data, which is easily detected by applications. We also propose a flexible methodology to mock an Android application that does not require any changes at the operating system level and at the virtual machine level. MockingBird is a very promising solution; we are currently testing its performance and increasing its functionality.