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Mobile applications (a.k.a., apps), which facilitate a large variety of tasks on mobile devices, have become indispensable in our everyday lives. Accomplishing a task may require the user to navigate among various apps. Unlike Web pages…
Application markets provide a communication channel between app developers and their end-users in form of app reviews, which allow users to provide feedback about the apps. Although security and privacy in mobile apps are one of the biggest…
With the releases of Android Oreo and Pie, Android introduced some background execution limitations for apps. Google restricted the execution of background services to save energy and to prevent apps from running endlessly in the…
Context: Smart TVs have become one of the most popular television types. Many app developers and service providers have designed TV versions for their smartphone applications. Despite the extensive studies on mobile app analysis, its TV…
Widely used payment splitting apps allow members of a group to keep track of debts between members by sending charges for expenses paid by one member on behalf of others. While offering a great deal of convenience, these apps gain access to…
Parental control applications, software tools designed to manage and monitor children's online activities, serve as essential safeguards for parents in the digital age. However, their usage has sparked concerns about security and privacy…
Many Android applications collect data from users. The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires vendors to faithfully disclose which data their apps collect. This task is complicated because many apps use…
We are in the dawn of deep learning explosion for smartphones. To bridge the gap between research and practice, we present the first empirical study on 16,500 the most popular Android apps, demystifying how smartphone apps exploit deep…
With the requirements and emphases on privacy transparency placed by regulations such as GDPR and CCPA, the Google Play Store requires Android developers to more responsibly communicate their apps' privacy practices to potential users by…
Android Permission Model and Application (app) analysis has consistently remained the focus of the investigation of research groups and stakeholders of the Android ecosystem since it was launched in 2008. Even though the Android smartphone…
Mobile phones have developed into complex platforms with large numbers of installed applications and a wide range of sensitive data. Application security policies limit the permissions of each installed application. As applications may…
Mobile advertisements (ads) are essential to the app economy, yet detecting them is challenging because ad content is dynamically fetched from remote servers and rendered through diverse user interfaces (UIs), making ads difficult to locate…
Mobile apps nowadays are often packaged with third-party ad libraries to monetize user data.
The industry for children's apps is thriving at the cost of children's privacy: these apps routinely disclose children's data to multiple data trackers and ad networks. As children spend increasing time online, such exposure accumulates to…
Networked applications traditionally derive their identity from the identity of the host on which they run. The default application identity acquired from the host results in subtle and substantial problems related to application…
App repackaging refers to the practice of customizing an existing mobile app and redistributing it in the wild. In this way, the attacker aims to force some mobile users to install the repackaged(likely malicious) app instead of the…
"App stores" are online software stores where end users may browse, purchase, download, and install software applications. By far, the best known app stores are associated with mobile platforms, such as Google Play for Android and Apple's…
Vendors in the Android ecosystem typically customize their devices by modifying Android Open Source Project (AOSP) code, adding in-house developed proprietary software, and pre-installing third-party applications. However, research has…
E-commerce mobile applications are central to global financial transactions, making their security and privacy crucial. In this study, we analyze 92 top-grossing Android e-commerce apps (58 U.S.-based and 34 international) using MobSF,…
The rise of mobile apps has brought greater convenience and customization for users. However, many apps use analytics services to collect a wide range of user interaction data purportedly to improve their service, while presenting app users…