(In)Security of Mobile Apps in Developing Countries: A Systematic Literature Review

TL;DR

This systematic review highlights the limited research on mobile app security in developing countries, emphasizing vulnerability detection and FinTech apps as primary focus areas, and underscores the need for more specialized security techniques.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of existing research, identifying gaps and emphasizing the need for tailored security solutions in developing countries.

Findings

Few studies on mobile app security in developing countries

Vulnerability detection is the main research focus

FinTech apps are the primary target

Abstract

In developing countries, several key sectors, including education, finance, agriculture, and healthcare, mainly deliver their services via mobile app technology on handheld devices. As a result, mobile app security has emerged as a paramount issue in developing countries. In this paper, we investigate the state of research on mobile app security, focusing on developing countries. More specifically, we performed a systematic literature review exploring the research directions taken by existing works, the different security concerns addressed, and the techniques used by researchers to highlight or address app security issues. Our main findings are: (1) the literature includes only a few studies on mobile app security in the context of developing countries ; (2) among the different security concerns that researchers study, vulnerability detection appears to be the leading research topic; (3) FinTech apps are revealed as the main target in the relevant literature. Overall, our work highlights that there is largely room for developing further specialized techniques addressing mobile app security in the context of developing countries.