HideDroid

An Android App for preserving user privacy

HideDroid is an Android app that allows the per-app anonymization of collected personal data according to a privacy level chosen by the user.

In a nutshell,HideDroid collects all the network traffic generated by the invocation of API calls belonging to analytics libraries, and extract the exported data.

Then, it anonymizes the personal and device data using a generalization technique, and the data related to the user’s behavior using an approach based on the concept of local differential privacy, in a way that preserves as much data semantics as possible.

Finally, the anonymized data are sent to the expected recipients by mimicking the original network calls.

❱ Compatibility with Android versions

5.x or lower	6.0	7.x	8.x	9.0	10.0	11.0	12.0
	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️	⚠️	⚠️

⚠️ HideDroid app has been compatible with all Android versions (also the newest ones 11 and 12) since the release 1.2. With Android versions 11 and 12, the HideDroid app requires that the user manually installs the CA certificate. Indeed, the HideDroid app generates the certificate and place it inside the SdCard storage, so the user can manually install it on its device. This operation is performed only for Android versions 11 and 12 due to new constraints on the programmatic installation of CA certificates, and it is performed programmatically in the other Android versions.

❱ Publication

More details about HideDroid can be found in the paper You can’t always get what you want: towards user-controlled privacy on Android:

@ARTICLE{caputo2021cant,
  author={Caputo, Davide and Pagano, Francesco and Bottino, Giovanni and Verderame, Luca and Merlo, Alessio},
  journal={IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing}, 
  title={You Can't Always Get What You Want: Towards User-Controlled Privacy on Android}, 
  year={2022},
  doi={10.1109/TDSC.2022.3146020}
}

Accepted on IEEE TDSC journal.

❱ App Screenshots

❱ Contributing

Questions, bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/Mobile-IoT-Security-Lab/HideDroid.

❱ License

This tool is available under a dual license: a commercial one required for closed source projects or commercial projects, and an AGPL license for open-source projects.

Depending on your needs, you must choose one of them and follow its policies. A detail of the policies and agreements for each license type is available in the LICENSE.COMMERCIAL and LICENSE files.

❱ Credits

This software was developed for research purposes at the Computer Security Lab (CSecLab), hosted at DIBRIS, University of Genova.

❱ Team

• Davide Caputo - Ph.D Student & Developer
• Francesco Pagano - Post-Graduate Research Fellow & Developer
• Giovanni Bottino - Developer
• Gabriel Claudiu Georgiu - Developer
• Luca Verderame - Postdoctoral Researcher
• Alessio Merlo - Faculty Member

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