Introducing the App Genome Project. July 27, 2010 Click to enlarge infographic The App Genome Project This week at the Black Hat Security Conference, Lookout will unveil the App Genome Project, which is the largest mobile application dataset ever created. In an ongoing effort to map and study mobile applications, the App Genome Project was created to identify security threats in the wild and provide insight into how applications are accessing personal data, as well as other phone resources. Early Findings Early findings show differences in the sensitive data that is being accessed by Android and iPhone applications, as well as a proliferation of third party code in applications across both platforms. . * Examples of third party code includes code that enables mobile ads to be served and analytic tracking for developers. New Security Vulnerabilities This vulnerability and others point to the need for developers to be more aware of best practices for accessing, transmitting and storing users’ personal data.
Free Mobile Security for Smartphones – Lookout. App Genome Project Lists Which Android and iPhone Apps Tap Your Personal Data. A new project is gathering information to find out who is gathering information about you. Lookout, a company that specializes in mobile security, has launched the App Genome Project to expose which Android and iPhone apps can tap your personal data.
Lookout plans to unveil its research at the Black Hat Security Conference on Wednesday. The project has fully mapped 100,000 Android and iPhone applications and has scanned an additional 200,000. So far, their findings are inconclusive as to whether one phone or the other is safer overall. About 29 percent of free Android apps can find out where their users are located, and 33 percent of free iPhone apps have the same capability. Another danger of apps? The ability to access your contact lists. But in another, more nebulous category, the iPhone seemed to win. Just 28 percent of iPhone apps are free, but 64 percent of Android apps have no charge, which may end up having greater implications for mobile users who download free apps exclusively.
App Genome Project eyes iPhone, Android security | InSecurity Complex. Mobile security firm Lookout has studied 300,000 Android and iPhone apps and fully analyzed nearly 100,000 that are free as part of a new App Genome project that's designed to help keep mobile users safe. The real-time database can help Lookout detect problems before they hit a large number of Android and iPhone users and help educate developers to problems posed by platform issues or poor coding processes.
The announcement comes on the cusp of the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. Lookout's researchers have uncovered a number of issues with the software that millions of people rely on either in the operating systems used in the phones or in apps found on the Android and iPhone marketplaces. For instance, the company said it found a new vulnerability called Mobile Data Leakage that occurs when developers inadvertently expose sensitive data in application logs in a way that makes that data accessible by other apps, said Lookout Chief Executive John Hering.