# A Multi-Tier Security Analysis of Official Car Management Apps for Android
###### Abstract  
Using automotive smartphone applications (apps) provided by car manufacturers may offer numerous advantages to the vehicle owner, including improved safety, fuel efficiency, anytime monitoring of vehicle data, and timely over-the-air delivery of software updates. On the other hand, the continuous tracking of the vehicle data by such apps may also pose a risk to the car owner, if, say, sensitive pieces of information are leaked to third parties or the app is vulnerable to attacks. This work contributes the first to our knowledge full-fledged security assessment of all the official single-vehicle management apps offered by major car manufacturers who operate in Europe. The apps are scrutinised statically with the purpose of not only identifying surfeits, say, in terms of the permissions requested, but also from a vulnerability assessment viewpoint. On top of that, we run each app to identify possible weak security practices in the owner-to-app registration process. The results reveal a multitude of issues, ranging from an over-claim of sensitive permissions and the use of possibly privacy-invasive API calls, to numerous potentially exploitable CWE and CVE-identified weaknesses and vulnerabilities, the, in some cases, excessive employment of third-party trackers, and a number of other flaws related to the use of third-party software libraries, unsanitised input, and weak user password policies, to mention just a few. smart cars; digital automotive services; security; privacy; Android; vulnerability assessment; dynamic analysis; static analysis +
Footnote †: journal: _Future Internet_  
tocols and libraries, are in place, there is a high risk of users exposed to privacy [2; 3; 4] and security vulnerabilities [5]. Actually, recent consumer and industry surveys have examined the security and privacy challenges related to the connected cars ecosystem [6; 7]. Specifically, Ref. [6] showed that approximately 59% of European consumers are aware that their vehicle can collect an array of potentially sensitive data, and 80% would only ponder sharing such data if certain incentives are stipulated, including less expensive car insurance rates. Additionally, due to data privacy concerns, about 77% of the respondents have not used a smartphone app or service. The industry survey in [7], conducted among more than 100 global automotive leaders, pinpointed that cybersecurity and data privacy are indeed a key concern in the automotive industry. Among others, a prominent inference is that about 84% of the respondents worried about the current cybersecurity practices and considered them to be rather outdated. Our contribution: Motivated by these facts, the work at hand is the first to our knowledge to attempt to shed light on the inner workings of this kind of official apps by analysing them under multiple diverse viewpoints. Precisely, this study contributes in revealing and pinpointing a range of significant weaknesses and security shortcomings possibly existing in this type of apps with the purpose of stimulating proper secure and privacy-preserving software engineering practices in regard to the app's whole life-cycle. Put simply, we empirically demonstrate that, as a proactive approach, security and privacy by design is of need in this rapidly ecosystem too. To this end, we employ both static and dynamic analysis methods, allowing us to dig deep and divulge multifarious security and privacy issues, which may directly or indirectly affect the end-user. Amongst them, one can discern (a) the use of an array of potentially dangerous permissions and privacy-invasive API calls, (b) several CWE- and CVE-identified weaknesses and vulnerabilities, (c) the use of third-party trackers, (d) flaws attributed to the employment of shared libraries, (e) possible user or other kinds of input sanitization hiccups, and (f) a number of security issues pertaining to the user-to-app registration and interaction. The remainder of this paper is organised in the following manner. The next section discusses the related work.