ReCon analyzes network traffic to tell if personal info is being transmitted

Re:ReCon analyzes network traffic to tell if personal info i... by netsharc on Wednesday May 31, 2017 @01:59PM (#14454566)

If you have a rooted Android (up to M, I believe) device, you can install Xposed[1] and XPrivacy[2], which prompts you when an app wants to do things like a DNS lookup, or access your address book. The most surprising thing I found with it was a fitness timer app that wants to be notified when my phone rings, with the phone number as a parameter... yeah, "Deny".

[1] http://repo.xposed.info/module/de.robv.android.xposed.instal...

[2] https://github.com/M66B/XPrivacy

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Re:ReCon analyzes network traffic to tell if personal info i... by cronology on Wednesday May 31, 2017 @02:07PM (#14454636)

I use Protect My Privacy[1] instead of XPrivacy. It has more intuitive UI and is being actively developed.

[1] http://repo.xposed.info/module/org.synergylabs.pmpandroid

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Re:ReCon analyzes network traffic to tell if personal info i... by drdaeman on Wednesday May 31, 2017 @02:39PM (#14454868)

It's a good solution, but may be less capable than XPrivacy, at least in some areas.

For example, I think PMP doesn't have options to filter loading native libraries or executing external commands - and this is sometimes useful, e.g. by blocking loadLibrary calls for libYandexMetricaNativeModule.so (some apps would crash, some would survive and would probably leak less analytics)

I believe both tools (and anything Xposed-based) isn't perfect, though - native code can work around this stuff. I wonder if there's QubesOS-like Android-in-Android (using a virtualization) solution exists, besides that Samsung's proprietary enterprisey nonsense...

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Re:ReCon analyzes network traffic to tell if personal info i... by dsacco on Wednesday May 31, 2017 @03:17PM (#14455152)

Which app was it?

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Re:ReCon analyzes network traffic to tell if personal info i... by drdaeman on Thursday June 01, 2017 @09:05AM (#14459891)

Any app with android.permission.READ_PHONE_STATE ("Phone calls — read phone status and identity")

All those apps receive android.intent.action.PHONE_STATE broadcasts whenever the phone state changes (new call, etc), and for the incoming calls that intent's data always (AFAIK, maybe some firmware builds have privacy controls for this) contains the phone number.

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Re:ReCon analyzes network traffic to tell if personal info i... by dsacco on Thursday June 01, 2017 @10:16AM (#14460390)

I understand that, I was really looking for the specific app so I know which to avoid. I use fitness trackers.

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Re:ReCon analyzes network traffic to tell if personal info i... by drdaeman on Thursday June 01, 2017 @07:21PM (#14465878)

You can check the full list of permissions of the particular app you use. Full permissions list is also available in Google Play - there's "permissions details" link at the very bottom (https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/6014972). Personally, I check this list for every app I find interesting.

If "read phone state" is listed then the app knows who's calling you, in a sense system feeds this data. Whenever the app uses it or not depends on how shady it is.

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