Yury Chemerkin has ten years of experience in information security. He is multi-skilled security expert on security & compliance and mainly focused on privacy and leakage showdown. Key activity fields are EMM and Mobile Computing, IAM, Cloud Computing, Forensics & Compliance. He published many papers on mobile and cloud security, regularly speaks at conferences such as CyberCrimeForum, DefCamp, HackerHalted, NullCon, OWASP, CONFidence, Hacktivity, Hackfest, DeepSec Intelligence, HackMiami, NotaCon, BalcCon, Intelligence Sec, InfoSec NetSysAdmins, RootCon, PHDays, etc.

Breaking Smart. Hacking health, wearable and smart apps to prevent leaking

Health and fitness apps are a growing industry. App developers are not aware of security requirements and best practice principles. Most health and fitness apps like many other apps, in general, collect a variety of personal data, sometimes non-fitness apps tend to have access to iOS/Android built-in health app. Software is incredibly complicated and is made by people. As such, it has many bugs, and some of them can be used to compromise your data. When these vulnerabilities and weakness are found, vendors ignore to release patches to fix them. More issues come from cloudy data, while companion devices’ apps gather information from multiple sources itself, the other health and fitness applications increase the quantity places where data stores including app-to-app data transfer and cloud export (iCloud, google drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc.) The far from the companion app, the more insecurity we have in fitness apps that do simple things while having powerful ‘read’ access to built-in health app and an ability to copy these data or directly access the wearable stuff.

The top sport, workout, fitness apps with built-in health apps were analyzed to see what problems they have to understand the overall health and fitness app security status better. It is essential to know how developers secure health information and how much of that data is available to third parties. Third party tools based on forensic techniques or forensics tools itself might have access to data bypassing the device and credentials. As such tools have comprehensive experience put into a tool code, you clearly understand what risks you have, what and how much data may leak and how better to build your security use cases to reduce discovered risks.