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arXiv · 1510.04083

Experimental Analysis of Popular Smartphone Apps Offering Anonymity, Ephemerality, and End-to-End Encryption

Lucky Onwuzurike·Emiliano De Cristofaro
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Abstract

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.

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Lucky Onwuzurike, Emiliano De Cristofaro. 2015-10-14. Experimental Analysis of Popular Smartphone Apps Offering Anonymity, Ephemerality, and End-to-End Encryption. https://arxiv.org/abs/1510.04083

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