Abstract
Mobile apps are critical in supporting the Indonesian provincial government during daily operations. Regarding their important role, these apps are the potential to become a target of malicious activity to gain access to government information. Hence, in this research, we conduct a security measurement of mobile apps affiliated with the provincial governments in Indonesia, aiming to provide a source of information for the app's developer to make further security improvements. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to conduct an empirical analysis related to this area, expecting to become a cornerstone for further research. In total, we found 162 mobile apps available on the Google Play Store and correlated to 31 province governments in Indonesia. We conducted standard mobile apps static analysis method, starting from metadata scraping of each provincial government-affiliated app available at the Google Play Store and measured their security based on several indicators, including access to sensitive permission, unprotected exported components, the adoption of binary protection mechanism, and the appearance of third-party tracker libraries. We found that 27.1% (44) government apps request at least two dangerous permission, over 5% of the apps embed the Advertisement library, 10% of the apps have more than five exported Activities, and 44 (25.94%) Indonesian government apps did not adopt any binary protection mechanism. Hence, these results can be tailored as a reference for the provincial government in determining the level of effectiveness and impact of an app when developing mobile-based software in the future.
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