A Survey on Potential Privacy Leaks of GPS Information in Android Applications

Android-based smart phones are extremely common today. However, it is believed that nearly half of the Android devices are vulnerable to an attack that alters the functionality of an app with malicious software. The malware can collect users’ sensitive data from the phone. In particular, there are hundreds of location-based applications available nowadays in the Google Play store or other app stores. The very famous services called “Location Based Services” are used by many apps on mobile phones to track the geographical coordinates of the device. Such location information can be leaked to an attacker via malware. In this thesis, we discuss different ways in which privacy can be breached in android applications and their countermeasures. The vulnerabilities, the method of detecting the information leakage, and the measures to control the security breach are discussed. The experimental results show how effectively those different countermeasures can help us in preventing the security breaches and information leakage of GPS data in android applications