PIITracker: Automatic tracking of personally identifiable information in windows

Meisam Navaki Arefi, Geoffrey Alexander, Jedidiah R. Crandall

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is information that can be used on its own or with other information to distinguish or trace an individual's identity. To investigate an application for PII tracking, a reverse engineer has to put considerable effort to reverse engineer an application and discover what an application does with PII. To automate this process and save reverse engineers substantial time and effort, we propose PIITracker which is a new and novel tool that can track PII automatically and capture if any processes are sending PII over the network. This is made possible by 1) whole-system dynamic information flow tracking 2) monitoring specific function and system calls. We analyzed 15 popular chat applications and browsers using PIITracker, and determined that 12 of these applications collect some form of PII.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 11th European Workshop on Systems Security, EuroSec 2018
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
ISBN (Electronic)9781450356527
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 23 2018
Externally publishedYes
Event11th European Workshop on Systems Security, EuroSec 2018 - Porto, Portugal
Duration: Apr 23 2018 → …

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 11th European Workshop on Systems Security, EuroSec 2018

Conference

Conference11th European Workshop on Systems Security, EuroSec 2018
Country/TerritoryPortugal
CityPorto
Period4/23/18 → …

Keywords

  • Dynamic information Flow tracking
  • Privacy
  • Reverse engineering

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality

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