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Among populations with limited literacy in emerging digital markets, the adoption of mobile phones, combined with comprehension barriers and poor cybersecurity hygiene, has created hidden privacy risks. This paper examines how informed…
Smartphone overuse has many negative effects on human beings. The function App Limits in our phones, which belongs to behavior reinforcement strategies for overcoming problematic smartphone overuse, constrains users by shutting them…
Mobile apps offer significant benefits, but their privacy protections often remain ineffective and confusing for users. While prior work mainly analyzes app privacy vulnerabilities, few approaches help users understand, set, and enforce…
Digital lending applications, commonly referred to as loan apps, have become a primary channel for microcredit in emerging markets. However, many of these apps demand excessive permissions and misuse sensitive user data for coercive…
Prior works have shown that the list of apps installed by a user reveal a lot about user interests and behavior. These works rely on the semantics of the installed apps and show that various user traits could be learnt automatically using…
Software complexity has increased over the years. One common way to tackle this complexity during development is to encapsulate features into a shared library. This allows developers to reuse already implemented features instead of…
Third-party Software Development Kits (SDKs) are widely adopted in Android app development, to effortlessly accelerate development pipelines and enhance app functionality. However, this convenience raises substantial concerns about…
The Android ecosystem faces a notable challenge known as fragmentation, which denotes the extensive diversity within the system. This issue is mainly related to differences in system versions, device hardware specifications, and…
Android apps are built on APIs that abstract core Android system functionalities. These APIs are officially documented in multiple files distributed with the Android source code or SDK, which we collectively refer to as Android API Lists…
The transparency and privacy behavior of mobile browsers has remained widely unexplored by the research community. In fact, as opposed to regular Android apps, mobile browsers may present contradicting privacy behaviors. On the one end,…
Many Android applications embed webpages via WebView components and execute JavaScript code within Android. Hybrid applications leverage dedicated APIs to load a resource and render it in a WebView. Furthermore, Android objects can be…
In Android apps, their developers frequently place app promotion ads, namely advertisements to promote other apps. Unfortunately, the inadequate vetting of ad content allows malicious developers to exploit app promotion ads as a new…
Mobile phones and tablets have become the most widely used computing devices, with a large predominance of the Android platform. As a natural evolution, the development of Android applications has surged and has become a major field of…
Adblocking tools like Adblock Plus continue to rise in popularity, potentially threatening the dynamics of advertising revenue streams. In response, a number of publishers have ramped up efforts to develop and deploy mechanisms for…
Android employs a permission framework that empowers users to either accept or deny sharing their private data (for example, location) with an app. However, many apps tend to crash when they are denied permission, leaving users no choice…
Researchers and commercial companies have made a lot of efforts on detecting malware in Android platform. However, a recent malware threat, App collusion, makes malware detection challenging. In App collusion, two or more Apps collaborate…
With the digital breakthrough, smart phones have become very essential component. Mobile devices are very attractive attack surface for cyber thieves as they hold personal details (accounts, locations, contacts, photos) and have potential…
Fragmentation is a serious problem in the Android ecosystem. This problem is mainly caused by the fast evolution of the system itself and the various customizations independently maintained by different smartphone manufacturers. Many…
The fragmentation problem has extended from Android to different platforms, such as iOS, mobile web, and even mini-programs within some applications (app). In such a situation, recording and replaying test scripts is a popular automated…
Cross-app collaboration via inter-component communication is a fundamental mechanism on Android. Although it brings the benefits such as functionality reuse and data sharing, a threat called component hijacking is also introduced. By…