Section: New Software and Platforms

Mobilitics

Mobilitics is a joint project, started in 2012 between Inria and CNIL, which targets privacy issues on smartphones. The goal is to analyze the behavior of smartphones applications and their operating system regarding users private data, that is, the time they are accessed or sent to third party companies usually neither with user's awareness nor consent.

In the presence of a wide range of different smartphones available in terms of operating systems and hardware architecture, Mobilitics project focuses actually its study on the two mostly used mobile platforms, IOS (Iphone) and Android. Both versions of the Mobilitics software: (1) capture any access to private data, any modification (e.g., ciphering or hashing of private data), or transmission of data to remote locations on the Internet; (2) store these events in a local database on the phone for offline analysis; and (3) provide the ability to perform an in depth database analysis in order to identify personnal information leakage.

A Mobilitics prototype for iOS has been developed since early 2012. A Mobilitics prototype for Android has been developped since mid-2013, running on Galaxy Nexus smartphones. In parallel an analysis tool has been developped, capable of analyzing the databases containing the raw data of both Mobile Operating Systems.

A first live experiment has been conducted by CNIL with the Mobilitics sofwtare for IOS with the help of volunteers equipped with iphones in September 2012-January 2013. As a result, some visualization tools have been developed for the data collected in order to showcase private data leakage by the apps which the participants of the experiment have used. A press conference has been held by CNIL and Inria in Paris in April 2013 and several Mobilitics results have been published in French newspapers (see Section  9.3 ).

A second live experiment has been conducted by CNIL with the Mobilitics software for Android, with the help of volunteers equipped with Galaxy Nexus smartphones, in June-September 2014. A press conference has been held by CNIL and Inria in December 2014, and several results have been published in French newspapers (see Section  9.3 ).