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When Harry Met Tinder: Security Analysis of Dating Apps on Android

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

As the number of smartphone users has increased, so has the popularity of dating apps such as Tinder, Hinge, Grindr and Bumbler. At the same time, however, many users have growing privacy concerns about these applications disclosing their sensitive and private information to other service providers and/or strangers. This is particularly exacerbated due to the nature of dating apps requiring access to users’ personal contents such as chat messages, photos, video clips and locations. In this paper, we present an analysis of security and privacy issues in popular dating apps on Android. We carefully analyze the possibility of software vulnerabilities on the five most popular dating apps on Android through network traffic analyses and reverse engineering techniques for each dating app. Our experiment results demonstrate that user credential data can be stolen from all five applications; three apps may lead to the disclosure of user profiles, and one app may lead to the disclosure of chat messages.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationSecure IT Systems - 23rd Nordic Conference, NordSec 2018, Proceedings
EditorsNils Gruschka
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages454-467
Number of pages14
ISBN (Print)9783030036379
DOIs
StatePublished - 2018
Event23rd Nordic Conference on Secure IT Systems, NordSec 2018 - Oslo, Norway
Duration: 28 Nov 201830 Nov 2018

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume11252 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference23rd Nordic Conference on Secure IT Systems, NordSec 2018
Country/TerritoryNorway
CityOslo
Period28/11/1830/11/18

Keywords

  • Android
  • Dating application
  • Privacy
  • Vulnerability

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