Related papers: Longitudinal Analysis of Android Ad Library Permis…
A growing concern with advertisement libraries on Android is their ability to exfiltrate personal information from their host applications. While previous work has looked at the libraries' abilities to measure private information on their…
The packaging model of Android apps requires the entire code necessary for the execution of an app to be shipped into one single apk file. Thus, an analysis of Android apps often visits code which is not part of the functionality delivered…
Although there are over 1,600,000 third-party Android apps in the Google Play Store, little has been conclusively shown about how their individual (and collective) permission usage has evolved over time. Recently, Android 6 overhauled the…
Privacy concerns have long been expressed around smart devices, and the concerns around Android apps have been studied by many past works. Over the past 10 years, we have crawled and scraped data for almost 1.9 million apps, and also stored…
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…
A wide variety of smartphone applications today rely on third-party advertising services, which provide libraries that are linked into the hosting application. This situation is undesirable for both the application author and the…
This paper reports a large-scale study that aims to understand how mobile application (app) vulnerabilities are associated with software libraries. We analyze both free and paid apps. Studying paid apps was quite meaningful because it…
The proper use of Android app permissions is crucial to the success and security of these apps. Users must agree to permission requests when installing or running their apps. Despite official Android platform documentation on proper…
In-app advertisements have become a major revenue source for app developers in the mobile app ecosystem. Ad libraries play an integral part in this ecosystem as app developers integrate these libraries into their apps to display ads. In…
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…
Android introduces a new permission model that allows apps to request permissions at runtime rather than at the installation time since 6.0 (Marshmallow, API level 23). While this runtime permission model provides users with greater…
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…
Third-party libraries (TPLs) have been widely used in mobile apps, which play an essential part in the entire Android ecosystem. However, TPL is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can ease the development of mobile apps. On the other…
Being able to automatically detect the performance issues in apps can significantly improve apps' quality as well as having a positive influence on user satisfaction. Application Performance Management (APM) libraries are used to locate the…
The Android market is a place where developers offer paid and-or free apps to users. Free apps are interesting to users because they can try them immediately without incurring a monetary cost. However, free apps often have limited features…
The age of technology has created a huge market for smartphones and Apps usage and a new generation has been created based on knowledge sharing. Now knowledge has been made easily accessible by Apps but; are users even aware of the…
Android applications are executed on smartphones equipped with a variety of resources that must be properly accessed and controlled, otherwise the correctness of the executions and the stability of the entire environment might be negatively…
The Android unrestricted application market, being of open source nature, has made it a popular platform for third-party applications reaching millions of smart devices in the world. This tremendous increase in applications with an…
Android apps require permissions when accessing resources related to privacy or system integrity. Starting from Android 6, these permissions have to be asked at runtime. However, migrating to the new permission model poses multiple…
Android's permission system is designed to balance usability with informed consent, yet two legacy mechanisms still undermine that balance in Android 16: (i) permission groups that silently auto-grant new permissions within a group after a…