Mobile Firewall applications: An analysis of usability and effectiveness

The amount of smartphone users worldwide exceeds three billion and that number is expected to grow. Sensitive data is often stored on the memory of smartphones and users of smartphones tend to be concerned about their data leaking out. Firewalls might prevent this, but do these firewalls work as expected? Do they block internet access for specific applications on the phone if requested? If these firewalls were to be used by technical and non-technical users, the user-friendliness is an important aspect as well. In order to examine the user-friendliness and effectiveness of the firewall applications in this research, usability tests and network traffic analyses are performed. The results of the network traffic analyses show that firewall applications do not blocks all network traffic when all applications are blocked. Usability tests indicate that the user-friendliness of firewall applications leaves much room for improvement.