iShield: A Framework for Preserving Privacyof iOS App User

Abstract

Do iOS apps honour user’s privacy? Protection of user’s privacy by apps has lately emerged as a big challenge. Many studies have identified that there exists an inherent trade-offbetween end user’s privacy and apps’functionality. Some methods have been proposed to preserve user’s privacy of specific data like location and health information. However, a comprehensive framework to enable privacy preserving data sharing by apps has not been found. In this paper, we have proposed iShield- a privacy preserving framework that can be easily integrated by developers at the time of app creation to enforce privacy with minimal performance overhead. Privacy threat to a user has been quantified by calculation of privacy disclosure score of an app user. Empirical results demonstrate that the approach significantly reduces the privacy disclosure of the user.