Biblio

Smartphones have become ubiquitous in our everyday lives, providing diverse functionalities via millions of applications (apps) that are readily available. To achieve these functionalities, apps need to access and utilize potentially sensitive data, stored in the user's device. This can pose a serious threat to users' security and privacy, when considering malicious or underskilled developers. While application marketplaces, like Google Play store and Apple App store, provide factors like ratings, user reviews, and number of downloads to distinguish benign from risky apps, studies have shown that these metrics are not adequately effective. The security and privacy health of an application should also be considered to generate a more reliable and transparent trustworthiness score. In order to automate the trustworthiness assessment of mobile applications, we introduce the Trust4App framework, which not only considers the publicly available factors mentioned above, but also takes into account the Security and Privacy (S&P) health of an application. Additionally, it considers the S&P posture of a user, and provides an holistic personalized trustworthiness score. While existing automatic trustworthiness frameworks only consider trustworthiness indicators (e.g. permission usage, privacy leaks) individually, Trust4App is, to the best of our knowledge, the first framework to combine these indicators. We also implement a proof-of-concept realization of our framework and demonstrate that Trust4App provides a more comprehensive, intuitive and actionable trustworthiness assessment compared to existing approaches.

Trust Management (TM) systems for authentication are vital to the security of online interactions, which are ubiquitous in our everyday lives. Various systems, like the Web PKI (X.509) and PGP's Web of Trust are used to manage trust in this setting. In recent years, blockchain technology has been introduced as a panacea to our security problems, including that of authentication, without sufficient reasoning, as to its merits.In this work, we investigate the merits of using open distributed ledgers (ODLs), such as the one implemented by blockchain technology, for securing TM systems for authentication. We formally model such systems, and explore how blockchain can help mitigate attacks against them. After formal argumentation, we conclude that in the context of Trust Management for authentication, blockchain technology, and ODLs in general, can offer considerable advantages compared to previous approaches. Our analysis is, to the best of our knowledge, the first to formally model and argue about the security of TM systems for authentication, based on blockchain technology. To achieve this result, we first provide an abstract model for TM systems for authentication. Then, we show how this model can be conceptually encoded in a blockchain, by expressing it as a series of state transitions. As a next step, we examine five prevalent attacks on TM systems, and provide evidence that blockchain-based solutions can be beneficial to the security of such systems, by mitigating, or completely negating such attacks.