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Android apps can hold secret strings of themselves such as cloud service credentials or encryption keys. Leakage of such secret strings can induce unprecedented consequences like monetary losses or leakage of user private information. In…
The ubiquity of smartphones, and their very broad capabilities and usage, make the security of these devices tremendously important. Unfortunately, despite all progress in security and privacy mechanisms, vulnerabilities continue to…
This paper presents a large-scale analysis of fingerprinting-like behavior in the mobile application ecosystem. We take a market-based approach, focusing on third-party tracking as enabled by applications' common use of third-party SDKs.…
Contemporary mobile applications (apps) are designed to track, use, and share users' data, often without their consent, which results in potential privacy and transparency issues. To investigate whether mobile apps have always been…
In the first quarter of 2011, Android has become the top-selling operating system for smartphones. In this paper, we present a novel, highly critical attack that allows unprompted installation of arbitrary applications from the Android…
Ad and tracking blocking extensions are popular tools for improving web performance, privacy and aesthetics. Content blocking extensions typically rely on filter lists to decide whether a web request is associated with tracking or…
Access to privacy-sensitive information on Android is a growing concern in the mobile community. Albeit Google Play recently introduced some privacy guidelines, it is still an open problem to soundly verify whether apps actually comply with…
We present a solution to the problem of privacy invasion in a multiparty digital rights management scheme. (Roaming) users buy content licenses from a content provider and execute it at any nearby content distributor. Our approach, which…
On the basis of the XSS (Cross Site Scripting) and Web Crawler techniques it is possible to go through the barriers of the Google Adsense advertising system by obtaining the validated links of the ads published on a website. Such method…
While mobile app evolution has been widely studied, geographical variation in app behavior remains largely unexplored. This paper presents a large-scale study of location-based Android app differentiation, uncovering two important and…
The Android permission system is a set of controls to regulate access to sensitive data and platform resources (e.g., camera). The fast evolving nature of Android permissions, coupled with inadequate documentation, results in numerous…
In the mobile app ecosystem, developers receive ad revenue by placing ads in their apps and releasing them for free. While there is evidence that users do not like ads, we do not know what are the aspects of ads that users dislike nor if…
The Android framework provides a rich set of APIs that can be exploited by developers to build their apps. However, the rapid evolution of these APIs jointly with the specific characteristics of the lifecycle of the Android components…
Artificial Intelligence has now taken centre stage in the smartphone industry owing to the need of bringing all processing close to the user and addressing privacy concerns. Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs), which are used by several AI…
Android Notifications can be considered as essential parts in Human-Smartphone interaction and inextricable modules of modern mobile applications that can facilitate User Interaction and improve User Experience. This paper presents how this…
App developers aim to create apps that cater to the needs of different types of users. This development approach, also known as the "one-size-fits-all" strategy, involves combining various functionalities into one app. However, this…
The majority of smartphones either run iOS or Android operating systems. This has created two distinct ecosystems largely controlled by Apple and Google - they dictate which applications can run, how they run, and what kind of phone…
Mobile gaming applications (apps) have become increasingly pervasive, including a growing number of games designed for children. Despite their popularity, these apps often integrate complex analytics, advertising, and attribution…
In the landscape of application ecosystems, today's cloud users wish to personalize not only their browsers with various extensions or their smartphones with various applications, but also the various extensions and applications themselves.…
In this paper, we seek to better understand Android obfuscation and depict a holistic view of the usage of obfuscation through a large-scale investigation in the wild. In particular, we focus on four popular obfuscation approaches:…