2015/10/14 by Onwuzurike, Lucky, De Cristofaro, Emiliano
#Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Social and Information Networks (cs.SI)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1510.04083
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.