We recommend a set of tips for developers to build usable, secure and privacy-friendly applications and we used them to implement BarSec Droid, a proof of concept Android application for barcode scanning. Based on that, we classify the apps into five groups: URL Security, Crypto-based security, Popular, Save privacy, Weak applications.

We also analyze the most popular downloaded apps, since being popular does not imply being secure. However, there are also apps that deceive the users by providing security and privacy protections which are weaker than what is claimed. Other apps guarantee user privacy by adopting least privilege permission lists. According to our analysis, there are some apps that provide security services including URL checking and cryptographic solutions. In this study, we thus analyse 100 barcode scanner applications from a security and privacy perspective. In our opinion, it is important to categorize, evaluate and discuss the feature of these applications. Several QR code reader applications claim to provide security and privacy characteristics. Recent studies show that barcodes can be maliciously used to run different attacks such as: phishing, malware propagation, cross-site scripting (XSS), SQL/command injection and reader applications attacks (see, e.g., ). The results show that our app has nice features, such as ease of use, provides security trust, is effective and efficient. We then conducted a user experience test on our app and we compared it with DroidLa, the most popular/secure QR code reader app.

Based on them, we also implemented BarSec Droid, a proof of concept Android application for barcode scanning. From the analysis, we extracted a set of recommendations that developers should follow in order to build usable, secure and privacy-friendly barcode scanning applications. We analyzed 100 barcode scanner applications and we categorized them based on the real security features they provide, or on their popularity. However, there are also apps that deceive the users by providing security and privacy protections that are weaker than what is claimed. According to our analysis, there are some apps that provide security services including checking URLs and adopting cryptographic solutions, and other apps that guarantee user privacy by supporting least privilege permission lists. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive security and privacy analysis of 100 barcode scanner applications. Several barcodes scanners are available but show security and privacy weaknesses. The widespread use of smartphones is boosting the market take-up of dedicated applications and among them, barcode scanning applications.

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