0TaintDroid: An Information-Flow Tracking System for Realtime Privacy Monitoring on Smartphones

Today’s smartphone operating systems frequently fail to provide users with visibility into how third-party applications collect and share their private data. We address these shortcomings with TaintDroid, an effi-cient, system-wide dynamic taint tracking and analysis system capable of simultaneously tracking multiple sources of sensitive data. TaintDroid enables realtime analysis by leveraging Android’s virtualized execu-tion environment. TaintDroid incurs only 32 % performance overhead on a CPU-bound micro-benchmark and imposes negligible overhead on interactive third-party applications. Using TaintDroid to monitor the behavior of 30 popular third-party Android applications, in our 2010 study we found 20 applications po-tentially misused users ’ private information; so did a similar fraction of the tested applications in our 2012 study. Monitoring the flow of privacy-sensitive data with TaintDroid provides valuable input for smartphone users and security service firms seeking to identify misbehaving applications