Experimental Analysis of Popular Smartphone Apps Offering Anonymity, Ephemerality, and End-to-End Encryption

As social networking takes to the mobile world, smartphone apps provide users with ever-changing ways to interact with each other. Over the past few years, an increasing number of apps have entered the market offering end-to-end encryption, self-destructing messages, and/or some degree of anonymity. However, little work has carefully examined the features they offer. To this end, this paper presents a taxonomy of 18 of such apps: we first look at the features they promise in their appeal to broaden their reach and focus on 8 of the more popular ones. We present a technical evaluation, based on static and dynamic analysis, and identify a number of gaps between the perception and reality of their promises.