Black Hat: App genome project

IDENTIFYING SECURITY THREATS and looking at how applications access personal data is the focus of mobile security firm Lookout's app genome project.

Showcased at the Black Hat 2010 conference in Las Vegas this week, the company claims the project will become the largest mobile applications dataset ever created. The company also intends to increase awareness of the threat posed by what it calls "mobile data leakage" at the Black Hat 2010 conference.

Lookout said that 33 per cent of free Iphone apps and 29 per cent of free Android apps can access the user's location, while eight per cent of free Android apps and 14 per cent of free Iphone apps can access the user's contact information.

"In one instance of this [location] vulnerability, Android was releasing user location data into logs in a way that made it accessible to other applications. That vulnerability has been addressed by Google and is fixed in all versions of Android 2.2 and beyond," said Lookout.

The company also found that 23 per cent of Iphone apps include third-party code, as opposed to 47 per cent of Android apps.

Mobile platform security continues to be a major issue as people increasingly turn to devices such as smartphones to carry out day-to-day activities such as banking. µ