[Openid-specs-heart] The best privacy paper in years - HEART

[Adrian Gropper]

The paper is a must-read for anyone trying to understand scope design of
APIs as well as those that would design registries or trust frameworks to
guide users that are considering signing up for an new app or web service.
- Adrian


https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.05661

arXiv:1608.05661 (*cross-listing*)
Date: Thu, 18 Aug 2016 07:36:11 GMT   (2469kb,D)

Title: The Curious Case of the PDF Converter that Likes Mozart: Dissecting
and
  Mitigating the Privacy Risk of Personal Cloud Apps
Authors: Hamza Harkous, Rameez Rahman, Bojan Karlas, Karl Aberer
Categories: cs.CY cs.HC
Journal-ref: Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies. Volume 2016,
Issue
  4, Pages 123-143, ISSN (Online) 2299-0984
DOI: 10.1515/popets-2016-0032
\\
  Third party apps that work on top of personal cloud services such as
Google
Drive and Dropbox, require access to the user's data in order to provide
some
functionality. Through detailed analysis of a hundred popular Google Drive
apps
from Google's Chrome store, we discover that the existing permission model
is
quite often misused: around two thirds of analyzed apps are over-privileged,
i.e., they access more data than is needed for them to function. In this
work,
we analyze three different permission models that aim to discourage users
from
installing over-privileged apps. In experiments with 210 real users, we
discover that the most successful permission model is our novel ensemble
method
that we call Far-reaching Insights. Far-reaching Insights inform the users
about the data-driven insights that apps can make about them (e.g., their
topics of interest, collaboration and activity patterns etc.) Thus, they
seek
to bridge the gap between what third parties can actually know about users
and
users perception of their privacy leakage. The efficacy of Far-reaching
Insights in bridging this gap is demonstrated by our results, as
Far-reaching
Insights prove to be, on average, twice as effective as the current model in
discouraging users from installing over-privileged apps. In an effort for
promoting general privacy awareness, we deploy a publicly available privacy
oriented app store that uses Far-reaching Insights. Based on the knowledge
extracted from data of the store's users (over 115 gigabytes of Google Drive
data from 1440 users with 662 installed apps), we also delineate the
ecosystem
for third-party cloud apps from the standpoint of developers and cloud
providers. Finally, we present several general recommendations that can
guide
other future works in the area of privacy for the cloud.



-- 

Adrian Gropper MD

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