Checks Android or iOS devices for apps used to surveil or track victims ("stalkerware", "spouseware", "spyware"). ISDi's technical details are included in "Clinical Computer Security for Victims of Intimate Partner Violence" (USENIX 2019). The blacklist is based on apps crawled in "The Spyware Used in Intimate Partner Violence" (IEEE S&P 2018).
For more information about contributing to ISDi, see the contribution guidelines.
For more information about contributing to ISDi, see the contribution guidelines.
Right now, ISDi currently only natively supports macOS and Linux. If you are using a Windows device, you can use the Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2), which can be installed by following these instructions. After this, follow the remaining instructions as a Linux user would, cloning/running ISDi inside the Linux container of your choice.
-
You will need Python 3.6 or higher (check by running
python3in your Terminal and see what happens). On macOS, you can get this by running the following commands in your Terminal application:xcode-select --install(installs developer tools); followed by/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"to get Brew (a software package manager); finally,brew install pythonto get Python 3.6+. -
Run
pip3 install -r requirements.txtin the base directory of this repository to get the required Python modules.
- adb
- expect
- libimobiledevice
- ideviceinstaller
- ifuse
On macOS you can quickly install project dependencies with Homebrew by running brew bundle.
You can also fulfill the requirements by doing:
brew install --cask android-platform-tools
brew install expect libimobiledevice ideviceinstaller
sudo apt install adb expect libimobiledevice-utils ideviceinstaller ifuse
Installing adb is not so straightforward in WSL2, and
it won't work straightaway. You have to ensure having the same version of adb
both in WSL2 and in normal Windows (with adb version), then you will need to
start the adb process first in Windows, then in WSL2 (with for example adb devices).
After ISDi is installed, with an Android or iOS device plugged in and unlocked, run the following command in the terminal (in the base directory of this repository)
$ ./isdi
ISDi defaults to normal (non-debug) mode. To run ISDi in test mode, set the TEST flag to 1:
$ TEST=1 ./isdi
Then navigate to http://localhost:6200 in the browser of your choice (or http://localhost:6202 if
in test mode). You will see ISDi running as a web app. Click on "Scan Instructions" and follow
the instructions to prepare your device for the scan.
It should look something like this:
Connect a device and click on the suitable button Android or iOS. Give it a
nickname and click "Scan now". (Please connect one device at a time.) It
will take a few seconds for the scan to complete. We are working to have all
scan results done at once on Android, but for the time being please leave the
device plugged in when clicking on apps on the scan results table.
After the scan, the UI will look something like this:
ISDi is intended to be used by advocates for victims of intimate partner violence in
a clinical setting;
you can add detailed notes about a victim's tech abuse situation
by clicking "Start Consult Form" on ISDi's homepage. The results
will be saved in data/fieldstudy.db and can be viewed/edited
by navigating to /form/edit.
Some consult form data may not be relevant for use in
other organizations (e.g., the meeting location being
in a borough of New York City). Please consider adapting the form
for your needs. One can do this by modifying the Client class in
isdi and use sa.create_all() (sa is obtained by wrapping SQLAlchemy over
the Flask app) to obtain the new
schema. Then place the new schema in schema.sql by updating the clients_notes table.
If you encounter errors, please file a GitHub issue with the server error output. Pull requests are welcome.
In the terminal of the computer, run adb devices to see if
the device is connected properly.
In the terminal of the computer (in the base directory of this repository),
run ./static_data/libimobiledevice-darwin/idevice_id -l to see if
the device is connected properly (replace darwin with linux if your system is Linux.)
It is possible to view your device screen(s) in real time on the macOS computer in a new window. This may be useful to have while you are running the scan (and especially if you use the privacy checkup feature), as it will be easy for you to see the mobile device screen(s) in real time on the Mac side-by-side with the scanner.
How to do it: You can mirror Android device screens in a new window using scrcpy, and cast iOS device screens on macOS with QuickTime 10 (launch it and click File --> New Movie Recording --> (on dropdown by red button) the iPhone/iPad name).
The data downloaded and stored in the study are the
following. 1. A sqlite database containing the feedback and actions taken by
the user. 2. phone_dump/ folder will have dump of some services in the
phone. (For Android I have figured out what are these, for iOS I don't know
how to get those information.)
The services that we can dump safely using dumpsys are the
following.
- Application static details:
packageSensor and configuration info: location,media.camera,netpolicy,mountResource information:cpuinfo,dbinfo,meminfoResource consumption:procstats,batterystats,netstats,usagestatsApp running information:activity,appops
See details about the services in notes.md
Only the appIds, and their names. Also, I got "permissions" granted
to the application. I don't know how to get install date, resource usage, etc.
(Any help will be greatly welcomed.)
phone_scanner.pyhas all the logic required to communicate with Android and iOS devices.parse_dump.pyhas all of the logic required to extract dumped info from the devices. After the initial scan, the server will rely on this parser rather than needing an active connection to the device (work in progress). For now, please keep your device plugged in when looking at scan results.isdiis the Flask web server and the application's main entry point.templates/folder contains the html templates rendering in the UIwebstatic/folder contains the.cssand.jsfilesphone_dumps/folder will contain the data recorded from the phone (as well as indata/fieldstudy.db.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fy6RTo9Gc0rBUBHAhKfSmqI99PSPCBsAdEUIbpGIkzQ/edit
2. How to figure out off-store apps in Android and iOS? Check the installer in
3. For iOS, how to find out app installation dates,
resource usage, etc? 4. Explore viability of
WebUSB and
WebADB.adb shell pm packages -i
See notes.md for other developer helps.