The secret life of software applications

One of the most undervalued problems by smartphone users is the security of data on their mobile devices. Today smartphones and tablets are used to send messages and photos and especially to stay connected with social networks, forums and other platforms. These devices contain a lot of private information like passwords, phone numbers, private photos, emails, etc. and an attacker may choose to steal or destroy this information. The main topic of this thesis is the security of the applications present on the most popular stores (App Store for iOS and Play Store for Android) and of their mechanisms for the management of security. The analysis is focused on how the architecture of the two systems protects users from threats and highlights the real presence of malware and spyware in their respective application stores. The work described in subsequent chapters explains the study of the behavior of 50 Android applications and 50 iOS applications performed using network analysis software. Furthermore, this thesis presents some statistics about malware and spyware present on the respective stores and the permissions they require. At the end the reader will be able to understand how to recognize malicious applications and which of the two systems is more suitable for him. This is how this thesis is structured. The first chapter introduces the security mechanisms of the Android and iOS platform architectures and the security mechanisms of their respective application stores. The Second chapter explains the work done, what, why and how we have chosen the tools needed to complete our analysis. The third chapter discusses about the execution of tests, the protocol followed and the approach to assess the “level of danger” of each application that has been checked. The fourth chapter explains the results of the tests and introduces some statistics on the presence of malicious applications on Play Store and App Store. The fifth chapter is devoted to the study of the users, what they think about and how they might avoid malicious applications. The sixth chapter seeks to establish, following our methodology, what application store is safer. In the end, the seventh chapter concludes the thesis.

Range Queries on an encrypted outsourced database

This project is about retrieving data in range without allowing the server to read it, when the database is stored in the server. Basically, our goal is to build a database that allows the client to maintain the confidentiality of the data stored, despite all the data is stored in a different location from the client's hard disk. This means that all the information written on the hard disk can be easily read by another person who can do anything with it. Given that, we need to encrypt that data from eavesdroppers or other people. This is because they could sell it or log into accounts and use them for stealing money or identities. In order to achieve this, we need to encrypt the data stored in the hard drive, so that only the possessor of the key can easily read the information stored, while all the others are going to read only encrypted data. Obviously, according to that, all the data management must be done by the client, otherwise any malicious person can easily retrieve it and use it for any malicious intention. All the methods analysed here relies on encrypting data in transit. In the end of this project we analyse 2 theoretical and practical methods for the creation of the above databases and then we tests them with 3 datasets and with 10, 100 and 1000 queries. The scope of this work is to retrieve a trend that can be useful for future works based on this project.