Analyzing the Effectiveness of App Vetting Tools in the Enterprise

Abstract

Enterprises invest significant resources in mobile application vetting to determine whether apps are safe to deploy on mobile devices. Application vetting seeks to identify security vulnerabilities and malicious or privacy violating behaviors in applications. It generally involves a time- and labor-intensive effort, resulting in high costs and delays in approving apps for use. Additionally, mobile application developers often operate on a rapid development cycle, where manual vetting approaches cannot keep up with the releases of new application versions. Mobile application vetting solutions exist that can help enterprises automate the mobile application vetting process. This report provides guidance to enterprises on how to assess the feasibility of applying these solutions, including MITRE's methodology, evaluation criteria, test applications, and overall results from MITRE's analysis performed in 2016 of available solutions. MITRE created criteria to evaluate the ability of these solutions to assess apps against requirements in the NIAP Protection Profile for Application Software, as well as additional criteria for broader application vetting solution capabilities, threats against the application vetting solution itself, and other common mobile application vulnerabilities and malicious behaviors.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Aug 22, 2016
Accession Number
AD1108045

Entities

People

  • Carlton Northern
  • Michael Peck

Organizations

  • MITRE Corporation

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Cyber

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Application Software
  • Authentication
  • Computer Program Documentation
  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Programs
  • Computers
  • Debugging
  • Global Positioning Systems
  • Information Systems
  • Mobile Application Software
  • Mobile Devices
  • Mobile Operating Systems
  • Mobile Phones
  • Network Protocols
  • Operating Systems
  • Random Number Generators
  • Software Development
  • Text Messaging
  • Transient Response Analysis
  • Web Browsers

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Cybersecurity.
  • Enterprise Information Systems Architecture and Joint Command Capability Interoperability Support.
  • Software Engineering.