Analysis and Classification of Some Selected Media Apps Vulnerability

Abstract

This research investigates popular messaging applications’ traffic in other to assess the security or vulnerability of communication on those applications. The experiment was carried out in a Local Area Network. Wireshark, NetworkMiner and Netwitness Investigators were used to capture and analyse the traffic. Ten (10) instant messaging applications were installed on Android platforms and used for the experiment. Different types of sensitive media files were recovered from the network traffic, including images, documents/texts and audio. The Internet Service Provider (ISP) of the sender was also recovered along with the resident city of the third party. The research classifies the mobile applications into vulnerable and nonvulnerable applications using the gathered data. Thus, it was discovered that out of ten mobile applications investigated, only Viber application was non-vulnerable to tested attacks. The classification result also shows random forest as the best classifier using this research data.