Study: Many free Android VPN apps not secure

A recent study by researchers at CSIRO, ICSI, UC Berkeley, and University of New South Wales showed that many free Android VPN apps are not actually secure. The study looked at close to 300 apps, and found that 84% leaked traffic, while 18% didn't use encryption at all. Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez, a scientist at ICSI and IMDEA who is a co-author of the study, was not surprised by the results, and in fact told The Verge that "the shocking fact was that people trust this kind of technology."

The results of this study have been covered in numerous technology news outlets, including Wired, Ars Technica, The Verge, and Threatpost. The abstract appears below, and you can read a pdf of the full study here,

Abstract:

Millions of users worldwide resort to mobile VPN clients to either circumvent censorship or to access geo-blocked content, and more generally for privacy and security purposes. In practice, however, users have little if any guarantees about the corresponding security and privacy settings, and perhaps no practical knowledge about the entities accessing their mobile traffic.

In this paper we provide a first comprehensive analysis of 283 Android apps that use the Android VPN permission, which we extracted from a corpus of more than 1.4 million apps on the Google Play store. We perform a number of passive and active measurements designed to investigate a wide range of security and privacy features and to study the behavior of each VPN-based app. Our analysis includes investigation of possible malware presence, third-party library embedding, and traffic manipulation, as well as gauging user perception of the security and privacy of such apps. Our experiments reveal several instances of VPN apps that expose users to serious privacy and security vulnerabilities, such as use of insecure VPN tunneling protocols, as well as IPv6 and DNS traffic leakage. We also report on a number of apps actively performing TLS interception. Of particular concern are instances of apps that inject JavaScript programs for tracking, advertising, and for redirecting e-commerce traffic to external partners.