Professional Documents
Culture Documents
3. DISCOVERING VPN APPS ON Table 2: Number of VPN apps identified with our detection
GOOGLE PLAY method.
This section describes our method for identifying and 300
Cummulative # of Apps
Free VPN Apps
characterizing Android VPN-enabled apps on Google Play. Premium VPN Apps
200 All VPN Apps
3.1 Detection Method
Identifying VPN-enabled apps on Google Play is not a 100
trivial task. The list of permissions available on a given app’s
Google Play profile does not necessarily contain the use of 0
9 0 0 1 1 2 2 3 3 4 4 5 5
Nov‘0 May‘1 Nov‘1 May‘1 Nov‘1 May‘1 Nov‘1 May‘1 Nov‘1 May‘1 Nov‘1 May‘1 Nov‘1
the VPN permission by the app.
App developers can request the Android VPN permissions Figure 1: Evolution of VPN-enabled apps’ availability on
in their app manifest file in two different ways: they can Google Play.
request the VPN permission within the scope of the whole
app or restrict its use to an specific activity or service1 us- published by the same developer. In total, this method has
ing the <activity> and <service> tags respectively. This allowed us to survey 1,488,811 apps during a three week pe-
subtle difference has an impact on any method aiming to de- riod in September 2015.
tect VPN-enabled apps: when a developer declares the per- Our method has allowed us to identify 283 free
mission within the <service> tag, the VPN permission does Android apps requesting the VPN permission in their
not show up in the list of Android permissions available on AndroidManifest files. 153 of free VPN apps require
Google Play. Consequently, in order to correctly identify the user to perform in-app purchases in order to use their
VPN-enabled apps at scale — either those using Android’s online VPN services. We refer to such apps as “premium
official permission or any of the custom VPN permissions VPN apps” and they typically offer weekly, monthly, quar-
listed in Table 1 —, we must crawl Google Play to down- terly and yearly subscriptions. In the case of paid apps, we
load each app’s executable and then decompile it to inspect relied on information available on the app description as sig-
their AndroidManifest file in detail. nals to identify potential paid VPN apps. This is the result of
We rely on multiple tools to fetch each app’s metadata our inability to pay the fee for downloading the executables
(e.g., app description, installs, developer, user reviews and of each paid app listed on Google Play. This approach has
app rating) and to download their executables. For free apps, allowed us to find 10 potential VPN paid apps. However, af-
we use Google Play Unofficial Python API [?] whereas for ter paying their fee to download their executables, only one
paid apps, we use Raccoon APK Downloader to obtain the of them actually requested the VPN permission. Therefore,
binaries after paying their required fee [42]. Finally, after we decided to exclude paid VPN apps from this study.
having downloaded each app’s executable, we use ApkTool2 Our dynamic network analysis (presented in Section 5)
to decompile, extract and analyze each app’s source code covers the 130 free apps and 20 premium VPN apps. Un-
and their AndroidManifest file. fortunately, we could not inspect the entirety of premium
To increase our app coverage and maximize the num- VPN apps as most of them are full MDM solutions which
ber of detected VPN apps, we implemented a Google Play require dedicated IT and cloud support. Table 2 summarizes
crawler that uses two complementary seeds. First, we ob- the scope of our static and dynamic analysis.
tain the app ID (or package name) from the top 100 apps
for four Google Play categories likely to contain VPN and 3.2 The Rise of VPN Apps
MDM apps: tools, communication, business and productiv- This section studies the presence of VPN-enabled apps
ity. Second, we leverage Google Play’s search feature to find available for download on Google Play over time. Given
apps containing VPN-related keywords like “vpn”, “virtual that Google Play does not report the actual release date of
private network”, “security”, “censorship”, “anonymity” or the apps but their last update, we use the date of their first
“privacy” in their app description. Afterwards, our crawler comment as a proxy for their release date. For 9 apps without
fetches each app’s metadata and executables. Our crawler any user reviews as of this writing, we can determine the
follows a breadth-first-search approach for any other app approximate release date by their last update.
considered as “similar” by Google Play and for other apps Figure 1 shows the steady increase of VPN apps’ listed
1 on Google Play since November 2011 (Android 4.0 release).
Android apps can be composed of multiple activities (i.e., app
Note that our analysis only considers apps listed on Google
components that run on the foreground on a single screen and re-
quire user interaction) and services (i.e., app components that per- Play as of September 2015 so it excludes possible VPN apps
form long-running operations in the background) [3]. Permission removed from Google Play. During the 2-year period that
requests can be limited to specific app components. spans between November 2011 and November 2013, the
2
https://ibotpeaches.github.io/apktool number of VPN apps increased ten-fold.
App Category % of Apps (N = 283) wall [33]) and even apps for securing online payments (e.g.,
VPN Clients 67 Fast Secure Payment [17]).
Enterprise 10
Traffic Optimizer 4
Communication Tools 3
4. STATIC ANALYSIS
Traffic filters 2 In this section, we analyze the source code for each VPN
Traffic logger 2 Android app using static analysis. In particular, we report
Antivirus 1
Tor clients 1 on applications requesting sensitive permission analysis, the
Other 10 presence of tracking libraries in app’s decompiled source
code and the presence of malware activity according to the
Table 3: Manual classification of VPN apps by their purpose.
online antivirus aggregator, VirusTotal3 .
60
% of Apps
All VPN Apps Free non−VPN Apps Free VPN Apps Premium VPN Apps
40
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Figure 2: Detailed comparison of Android permissions (x-axis) requested by VPN apps and the top-1,000 non-VPN apps.
VPN Apps Free # App ID Class Rating # Installs AV-rank
# Trackers Premium Free All non-VPN Apps
1 OkVpn [34] Prem. 4.2 1K 24
0 65% 28% 33% 19% 2 EasyVpn [15] Prem. 4.0 50K 22
1 13% 10% 8% 11% 3 SuperVPN [52] Free 3.9 10K 13
2 10% 10% 7% 15% 4 Betternet [19] Free 4.3 5M 13
3 12% 25% 13% 23% 5 CrossVpn [7] Free 4.2 100K 11
4 2% 8% 4% 16% 6 Archie VPN [4] Free 4.3 10K 10
≥5 5% 18% 8% 17% 7 HatVPN [21] Free 4.0 5K 10
8 sFly Network Booster [47] Prem. 4.3 1K 10
Table 4: Distribution of third party trackers embedded in 9 One Click VPN [35] Free 4.3 1M 6
VPN apps. 10 Fast Secure Payment [17] Prem. 4.1 5K 5
Figure 3: Top 25 third-party tracking libraries (x-axis) in VPN and non-VPN apps.
# of Apps
number of affiliated AV tools that identified any malware 40 ●
20
activity) to reason about the maliciousness of an app. The 0
study by Arp et al. [?] considered as a valid metric for mal-
ware presence on mobile apps an “AV-Rank" ≥ 2. Instead, 5
their Google Play rating and the number of install for refer-
50
00
1K
0K
0K
0M
0 20 40 60
1−
50
−5
50
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−5
5−
−1
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−1
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−1
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1K
0K
1M
50
K−
50
5K
5M
ence. The malware signatures for those apps correspond to # of Apps
10
0K
10
50
50
10
# of Installs ●
% of Apps
75
App Category free premium
IPv6 and DNS leaks. We observe that 84% of the analyzed 50
VPN apps do not route IPv6 traffic through the VPN tun- 25
nel. Moreover, 66% of the VPN apps do not forward DNS
0
traffic through the VPN tunnel so any in-path observer can
21 22 25 80 110 135 139 143 161 443 445 465 585 587 993 995 194 723 060 881 001
monitor the DNS networking activity of the user. IPv6 and TCP Port
1 1 5 6 9
Table 11: HotspotShield redirects user traffic to alibaba.com and ebay.com through its partner networks Conversant
Media and Viglink respectively. In the case of target.com, bestbuy.com, overstock.com, newegg.com and
macys.com we observed re-directions to Conversant Media.
(14% of VPN apps), and image transcoding (4% of VPN (or Conversant Media, an online advertising company16 ).
apps). Table 11 contains two samples of such requests. Our tests
also identified a second partner: Viglink17 . According
Ad-Blocking and Tracker-Blocking. Two of the analyzed
to AnchorFree’s website, the app provides “shielded
VPN apps actively block ads and analytics traffic by default
connections, security, privacy enhancement for individ-
on our tested websites: Secure Wireless and F-Secure Free-
uals and small businesses” and an “ad-free browsing”
dome VPN. The apps did not explicitly mention ad-blocking
environment [24].
feature in the Google Play store listings14 . An analysis of
the decompiled source code, using ApkTool, revealed that F- 5.4 TLS Interception
Secure Freedome VPN app blocks any traffic coming from
a pre-defined list of domains associated with web and mo- VPN apps are in a privileged position to perform TLS in-
bile tracking [16] including Google Ads, DoubleClick, and terception [101]. They can compromise the local root cer-
other popular tagging/analytics services such as Google Tag tificate store of the device by injecting their own self-signed
and comScore. However, blacklist-based ad blocking may certificates using Android’s KeyChain API [?]. Once a cer-
affect the functionality of the Webpages and impairs user tificate is installed on the device, the app can intercept the
experience [81, ?]. Specifically, F-Secure Freedome VPN TLS session establishment and generate “legit” certificates
blocks JavaScript code associated with nytimes.com’s — verifiable by the self-signed root certificate injected on
event “TaggingServices” which, as a result, prevents user the trusted certificate root store — on the fly [101]. To limit
access and interaction with embedded relevant video con- potential new venues for abuse, Android requires user’s con-
tent [81]. sent to install root certificates and it shows an additional
system notification that informs the user that a third-party
JavaScript Injection. We identified two free VPN apps can monitor their secure traffic. Only tech-savvy users may
(VPN Services HotspotShield [25] by AnchorFree and WiFi be able to fully understand the security implications of in-
Protector VPN [64]) actively injecting JavaScript codes us- stalling a root certificate.
ing iframes for advertising and tracking purposes. Both We instrumented our Android device with OpenSSL so
apps claim to safeguard user privacy and to provide security that we can capture a copy of the SSL/TLS server certifi-
and anonymization (cf Section 3.3). However, in the case cate when accessing more than 60 popular services operat-
of AnchorFree, they also provide advertising services [24]. ing over SSL including HTTPS, SMTP over TLS, and POP3
Our static analysis of both apps’ source code revealed that over TLS. The services reached in our test include diverse
the actively use more than 5 different third-party tracking and popular services like Google, Gmail, Facebook, Twit-
libraries. The developer team behind WiFi Protector VPN ter, Skype, banking services, CDNs, analytics services and
corroborated our observations and stated that the free version e-commerce sites, many of which are associated with mobile
of its app injects JavaScript code for tracking and displaying apps implementing security countermeasures such as certifi-
their own ads to the users. cate pinning [76, 45].
Traffic Redirection. AnchorFree’s VPN app Hotspot- We validated each server certificate against the ICSI Cer-
Shield performs redirection of e-commerce traffic to tificate Notary to identify possible cases of TLS interception:
partnering domains. When a client connects through 3% of the TLS sessions provided certificates for which the
the VPN to access specific web domains15 , the app ICSI notary could not establish a valid chain to a root cer-
leverages a proxy that intercepts and redirects the HTTP tificate from the Mozilla root store. By inspecting manually
requests to partner websites with the following syntax: each certificate, we identify 4 free VPN apps (developed by
http://anchorfree.us/rdr.php?q=http://www.dpbolvw.net/ 3 different app developers) that actively intercept TLS traffic
click-7772790-12173149-1427959067000. As a re- by issuing self-signed certificates as shown in Table 12. Two
sult, user’s traffic is relayed through two organiza- of the apps implementing TLS interception, DashVPN and
tions before reaching alibaba.com: AnchorFree and DashNet, are implemented by the company ActMobile
dpbolvw.net, a domain owned by valueclick.com A detailed inspection of the domains for which we
recorded self-signed certificates, revealed that only the app
14
Contrary to Google Play listings, F-Secure Freedome VPN Packet Capture performs TLS interception indiscriminately
mentioned its ad-blocking feature on its webiste, https://www.f- for all domains even if the apps perform cert pinning. The
secure.com/. other apps, — Neopard, DashVPN and DashNet all of which
15
During our experiments redirection happened exclusively
16
for websites categorized as e-commerce sites such as http://www.conversantmedia.com
17
alibaba.com. http://www.viglink.com
VPN app CA User-warning # Installs order to expose TLS traffic to its users. Likewise, Neopard,
Packet Capture [38] Packet Capture GUI 100K a web acceleration app, also notifies users about the purpose
DashVPN [10] ActMobile 100K of performing TLS interception in order to optimize traffic.
DashNet [9] ActMobile 10K Their privacy policy (April 2016) [31] informs users about
Exalinks Neopard [30] Exalinks Root Privacy Policy 10K
TLS interception and lists “perform mobile usage reviews
Table 12: VPN apps performing TLS interception, the CA for market studies” as one of the purposed of their data col-
signing the forged certificates and if the apps explicitly in- lection process. In the case of DashVPN and DashNet, none
form the user about TLS interception practices in their GUI of them inform users about the purpose of performing TLS
or in their privacy policy. interception at all.
claim to provide traffic acceleration — target specific ser- Summary and takeaways.
vices as reported in Table 13, more inclined towards email Our analysis of VPN apps at the network level has re-
services, social networks search engines and IM. This be- vealed that the majority of VPN apps are not transparent
havior may be a consequence of the nature of the apps and enough about how they handle user’s traffic. Despite the
the intent of the online services that they aim to optimize. promises for security enhancement and online anonymity,
VPN apps may forward user’s traffic through other partici-
Domain (PORT) Neopard DashVPN DashNet
Packet pating nodes following a peer (e.g., Hola) thus opening in-
Capture teresting questions about the trustworthiness of the egress
google-analytics.com points and the security guarantees for users forwarding traf-
mail.google.com fic for others.
mail.yahoo.com Our analysis has also revealed an alarming 18% of VPN
maps.google.com apps that implement tunneling technologies without encryp-
orcart.facebook.com (8883) 8 8 tion as well as 84% and 66% of apps leaking IPv6 and DNS
play.google.com traffic. As a result, these apps do not protect user’s traffic
www.akamai.com 8 8
against in-path agents performing online surveillance or user
www.alcatel-lucent.com 8 8
tracking. We inspect app descriptions on Google Play store
www.amazon.com 8 8
www.avaya.com 8 8
and observe that 94% of the IPv6 and DNS leaking apps
www.bankofamerica.com 8 claim to provide privacy protection. Such traffic leaks may
www.chase.com 8 be associated with developer-induced errors, lack of support
www.cisco.com 8 8 or even misconfigurations.
www.ebay.com 8 8 Finally, we have also identified abusive practices in our
www.facebook.com corpus of VPN apps such as JavaScript injection for track-
www.fring.com 8 ing and advertising purposes, as well as e-commerce traffic
www.gmail.com redirection to affiliated partners and TLS interception. Only
www.google.co.uk one of the apps implementing these practices (i.e., Packet
www.google.com Capture performing TLS interception) actually inform the
www.hotwire.com 8 8 users about the presence of such artifacts.
www.hsbc.com 8 8
www.ibm.com 8 8 5.5 Developers’ responses
www.icsi.berkeley.edu 8
www.linkedin.com 8 8
We contacted and shared our findings with the developers
www.outlook.com 8 of each of the apps we observed as involved in any of the fol-
www.qq.com 8 8 lowing: JavaScript injection, traffic redirection, ad-blocking
www.seagate.com 8 8 and tracker-blocking, exogenous flow, peer-forwarding user
www.simple.com 8 8 traffic, and TLS interception. We also contacted app devel-
www.skype.com 8 opers of apps requesting sensitive permissions, apps that are
www.taobao.com 8 8 negatively reviewed by users, and the ones with embedded
www.tripadvisor.com 8 8 third-party tracking libraries. We also contacted apps which
www.twitter.com our tests revealed as possibly containing malware in their
www.viber.com 8 APKs.
www.yahoo.com Amongst the two apps (WiFi Protector and HotspotShield
www.youtube.com 8
VPN) that our tests identified as performing JavaScript injec-
Table 13: Intercepted domains per VPN app. The list only tion, WiFi Protector confirmed our findings and stated that
prints the TCP port for those different than 443. the free version of their app injects JavaScript code to track
users and to show their own ads. HotspotShield VPN, which
We manually inspected the app’s GUI to check if the apps we identified as also performing traffic redirection, has not
inform users about the purpose of performing TLS intercep- responded to our correspondence.
tion and what TLS interception implies. Packet Capture sup- The developer behind F-Secure Freedome VPN, we found
ports TLS interception (as an opt-in feature in the app) in that it blocks third-party ads and trackers, confirmed our
findings and elaborated on how they construct their black- free Google Play apps and excludes paid apps, iOS apps and
lists for third-party trackers- and ads-blocking. The devel- apps from alternative app stores. We also rely on a Google
oper did not respond yet to our inquiries about the crite- Play crawler to extract our corpus of VPN-enabled apps that
ria used to build the blacklists. We have not received any might restrict the app coverage of our study which may miss
response from Secure WiFi that our tests also identified as apps that intentionally (or inadvertently) hide their use of
performing ad-blocking. the VPN permission. Although our apps crawler aims to
We received responses from only three developers of the capture as many VPN-enabled apps as possible, we stress
apps that we observed implementing peer-forwarding of user that our goal is to provide an analysis of the security and
traffic. VyperVPN and VPNSecure confirmed that they have privacy issues of a representative sample of VPN-enabled
some of their end-points located in residential ISPs as they apps from the Google play store. Second, this paper does
may rely on third-party data-centers for hosting their ser- not consider Android apps requesting root access on rooted
vices. Hola’s developer confirmed our findings and explic- phones to intercept user traffic via native commands such as
itly mentioned Hola’s peer-forwarding mechanism. Contacts tcpdump or OpenVPN. Investigating apps falling in this cat-
from other apps detailed in Table 9 have not yet, as of the egory would require conducting a computational- and time-
time of writing of this paper, responded to our requests for expensive static analysis. Third, we do consider runtime
comments or feedback. analysis of third-party tracking libraries and all sensitive per-
Neopard confirmed that they whitelist the domains for missions of VPN apps. Determining what an app do with
which they can optimize traffic and asked for feedback about sensitive permissions such as READ_LOG, READ_SMS, and
how to increase their operational transparency and usability. SEND_SMS and what type of information will third-party
ActMobile, initially, asked for further information about the tracking libraries collect would require fine-grained system-
purpose of this study and who has commissioned and later and network-level trace and traffic analysis.
on, acknowledged our findings, confirmed that they disable Moreover, we identify apps implementing peer forward-
the default TLS-interception functionality in both of the apps ing from the set of VPN apps with public IP addresses la-
(DashVPN and Dashnet). They also reported that, in the beled as residential IPs by Spamhaus PBL. Given that VPN
new version of the apps, they ask for user consent, explic- services can deploy VPN servers in residential ISPs and
itly in the apps’ GUIs, to install and to enable the ActMo- Spamhaus classification is prone to error, our analysis of
bile’s certificates for TLS-interception and traffic accelera- peer forwarding may not be accurate. We consider it as a
tion, respectively. We have not received any response from limitation and one possible extension of the work in this pa-
the developer behind Packet Capture that our tests identified per would be to strengthen our analysis of peer forwarding
as performing TLS-interception. by (i) extending the tests duration to enable tracking of peers
Only one of the apps’ developers, explicitly discussed (running suspected VPN apps); and (ii) analyzing the traf-
in Section 4.1, responded to our findings and confirmed fic flows of an app simultaneously running on two or more
that tigerVPN requests sensitive READ_LOG permission to mobile phones to determine if they forward traffic for each
record and to use it for troubleshooting purposes. They other.
also confirmed that, in the connection log collected via Likewise, our method falls short to analyze the presence
READ_LOG permission, they collect users’ information such of session timeouts and apps’s ability to recover from a loss
as end-points’ IPs, wireless (mobile data connectivity (3G, of connectivity. These dynamics may cause user traffic to
4G, and LTE) or WiFi) connectivity, and error messages. be exposed in the clear to any in-path middlebox for a short
The developer behind Ip-shield VPN that we identified as period of time.
embedding less-popular tracking libraries such as Appflood This paper provides a first detailed analysis of VPN-
for targeted ads argued that the Appflood was the best choice enabled apps but it also leaves many open questions beyond
to monetize the app. The developer also revealed plans to the scope of our analysis. Aspects such as possible traffic
update ad-free version of Ip-shield VPN on Google Play. or device-location discrimination practices [83] or the use
The rest of the developers of the apps with possibly con- of VPN apps as honeypots to harvest personal information
taining malware (cf. Section 4.3), apps that are negatively have not been addressed in this study. In addition, reasons
reviewed by users (cf. Section 4.4), apps that are embed- behind inadequacy of app actual behavior and terms of use
ding third-party tracking libraries (cf. Section 4.2), and the or the the identification of side-channels for the observed
one with exogenous traffic flows (cf. Section 5.1) have not data-exfiltration have been left as pending questions.
yet, as of the time of writing of this paper, responded to our
findings.
7. RELATED WORK
Several studies highlighted the privacy risks associated
6. LIMITATIONS AND FUTURE with Android apps over-requesting Android permissions for
WORK third-party tracking, advertising and analytic services [99,
Our method to identify and characterize VPN apps on 97, 88, 71, 72] using techniques like static analysis [106, 67,
Google Play presents several limitations, many of which are 77, 78], taint analysis [75, 104], and OS modifications [82,
inherent to static and dynamic analysis [76]. The first lim- 94, 99, 80]. Previous research also adapted techniques for
itation is app’s coverage: our study is limited to Android’s malware detection such as signature analysis [69, 68, 85,
105] and anomaly detection [98, 96] to the mobile context in Acknowledgments
order to identify potential malicious activity on mobile apps. This work was partially supported by Data61/CSIRO and
Several research efforts leverage Android’s VPN permis- NSF grant CNS-1564329. Any opinions, findings, and con-
sion to accurately characterize Android’s traffic and identify clusions or recommendations expressed in this material are
private data leakage inflicted by mobile apps [87, 93, 100]. those of the authors or originators and do not necessarily
More related to studying VPN apps, the study conducted by reflect the views of the Data61/CSIRO or of the NSF. The
Perta et al. [91] is perhaps the closest one to our analysis. authors would like to thank our shepherd, Ben Zhao, the
The paper provides a manual analysis of 14 popular VPN anonymous reviewers for constructive feedback on prepa-
services and includes a study of their their mobile clients ration of the final version of this paper. We also thank Nick
identifying developer-induced bugs and mis-configurations Kiourtis (Kryptowire) and Angelos Stavrou (Kryptowire) for
that lead to IPv6 and DNS leaks. Our paper provides a sys- valuable help.
tematic and thorough security and privacy analysis of An-
droid mobile apps employing the VPN permission. The
study by Vallina-Rodriguez et al. characterized Android’s 9. REFERENCES
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