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Android OS is severely fragmented by API updates and device vendors' OS customization, creating a market condition where vastly different OS versions coexist. This gives rise to compatibility crash problems where Android apps crash on…

Offloading work to cloud is one of the proposed solutions for increasing the battery life of mobile devices. Most prior research has focused on computation-intensive applications, even though such applications are not the most popular ones.…

Code bloat widely exists in production-run software. Left untackled, it not only degrades software performance but also increases its attack surface. In this work, we conduct a case study to understand this issue in statically linked…

Online political advertising has grown significantly over the last few years. To monitor online sponsored political discourse, companies such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter have created public Ad Libraries collecting the political ads…

The ability to identify the author responsible for a given software object is critical for many research studies and for enhancing software transparency and accountability. However, as opposed to other application markets like iOS,…

Developers are increasingly integrating Language Models (LMs) into their mobile apps to provide features such as chat-based assistants. To prevent LM misuse, they impose various restrictions, including limits on the number of queries, input…

Android apps have become a valuable target for app modifiers and imitators due to its popularity and being trusted with highly sensitive data. Packers, on the other hand, protect apps from tampering with various anti-analysis techniques…

Mobile apps are used in a variety of health settings, from apps that help providers, to apps designed for patients, to health and fitness apps designed for the general public. These apps ask the user for, and then collect and leak a wealth…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capability in function-level code generation tasks. Unlike isolated functions, real-world applications demand reasoning over the entire software system: developers must orchestrate…

Today, much of our sensitive information is stored inside mobile applications (apps), such as the browsing histories and chatting logs. To safeguard these privacy files, modern mobile systems, notably Android and iOS, use sandboxes to…

With the popularity of mobile devices, mobile applications have become an essential part of people's lives. To provide secure mobile application download channels for users, various modern app markets are maintained by different companies.…

The use of sponsored product listings in prominent positions of consumer search results has made e-commerce platforms, which traditionally serve as marketplaces for third-party sellers to reach consumers, a major medium for those sellers to…

Password managers help users more effectively manage their passwords, encouraging them to adopt stronger passwords across their many accounts. In contrast to desktop systems where password managers receive no system-level support, mobile…

Malware authors reuse the same program segments found in other applications for performing the similar kind of malicious activities such as information stealing, sending SMS and so on. Hence, there may exist several semantically similar…

Ads Content Safety at Google requires classifying billions of ads for Google Ads content policies. Consistent and accurate policy enforcement is important for advertiser experience and user safety and it is a challenging problem, so there…

The permission mechanism in the Android Framework is integral to safeguarding the privacy of users by managing users' and processes' access to sensitive resources and operations. As such, developers need to be equipped with an in-depth…

The recent decade has witnessed phenomenal growth in communication technology. Development of user-friendly software platforms, such as Facebook, WhatsApp etc. have facilitated ease of communication and thereby people have started freely…

This paper explores technology permitting arbitrary application components to be exposed for remote access from other software. Using this, the application and its constituent components can be written without concern for its distribution.…

Context: In-app advertising is the primary source of revenue for many mobile apps. The cost of advertising (ad cost) is non-negligible for app developers to ensure a good user experience and continuous profits. Previous studies mainly focus…

Mobile app distribution platforms such as Google Play Store allow users to share their feedback about downloaded apps in the form of a review comment and a corresponding star rating. Typically, the star rating ranges from one to five stars,…