Comprehensive quantitative analysis on privacy leak behavior

PLoS One. 2013 Sep 16;8(9):e73410. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0073410. eCollection 2013.

Abstract

Privacy information is prone to be leaked by illegal software providers with various motivations. Privacy leak behavior has thus become an important research issue of cyber security. However, existing approaches can only qualitatively analyze privacy leak behavior of software applications. No quantitative approach, to the best of our knowledge, has been developed in the open literature. To fill this gap, in this paper we propose for the first time four quantitative metrics, namely, possibility, severity, crypticity, and manipulability, for privacy leak behavior analysis based on Privacy Petri Net (PPN). In order to compare the privacy leak behavior among different software, we further propose a comprehensive metric, namely, overall leak degree, based on these four metrics. Finally, we validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach using real-world software applications. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach can quantitatively analyze the privacy leak behaviors of various software types and reveal their characteristics from different aspects.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Computer Security*
  • Humans
  • Privacy*
  • Software

Grants and funding

This work is supported by National Program (973 Program) on Key Basic Research Project of China (No. 2013CB329602, 2012CB316303) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61173008, 61100175, 61232010, 60933005?61303244). Y. Wang is supported by Beijing Nova Program (No. Z121101002512063). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.