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Due to the convenience of access-on-demand to information and business solutions, mobile apps have become an important asset in the digital world. In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, app developers have joined the response effort in…
We present an analysis of 12 million instances of privacy-relevant reviews publicly visible on the Google Play Store that span a 10 year period. By leveraging state of the art NLP techniques, we examine what users have been writing about…
Smartphones contain a trove of sensitive personal data including our location, who we talk to, our habits, and our interests. Smartphone users trade access to this data by permitting apps to use it, and in return obtain functionality…
We study the temporal dynamics of potentially harmful apps (PHAs) on Android by leveraging 8.8M daily on-device detections collected among 11.7M customers of a popular mobile security product between 2019 and 2020. We show that the current…
Accurate detection of third-party libraries (TPLs) is fundamental to Android security, supporting vulnerability tracking, malware detection, and supply chain auditing. Despite many proposed tools, their real-world effectiveness remains…
Android is the most used Operating System worldwide for mobile devices, with hundreds of thousands of apps downloaded daily. Although these apps are primarily written in Java and Kotlin, advanced functionalities such as graphics or…
In recent years, there has been rapid growth in mobile devices such as smartphones, and a number of applications are developed specifically for the smartphone market. In particular, there are many applications that are ``free'' to the user,…
Large software organizations such as Facebook or Netflix, who otherwise make daily or even hourly releases of their web applications using continuous delivery, have had to invest heavily into a customized release strategy for their mobile…
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,…
In the age of ubiquitous technologies, security- and privacy-focused choices have turned out to be a significant concern for individuals and organizations. Risks of such pervasive technologies are extensive and often misaligned with user…
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…
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…
Developers rely on third-party library Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) when developing software. However, libraries typically come with assumptions and API usage constraints, whose violation results in API misuse. API misuses may…
The login functionality, being the gateway to app usage, plays a critical role in both user experience and application security. As Android apps increasingly incorporate login functionalities, they support a variety of authentication…
The Google Play marketplace has introduced the Data Safety section to improve transparency regarding how mobile applications (apps) collect, share, and protect user data. This mechanism requires developers to disclose privacy and…
Authorship identification is the process of identifying and classifying authors through given codes. Authorship identification can be used in a wide range of software domains, e.g., code authorship disputes, plagiarism detection, exposure…
Android adopted SELinux's mandatory access control (MAC) mechanisms in 2013. Since then, billions of Android devices have benefited from mandatory access control security policies. These policies are expressed in a variety of rules,…
In the appstore-centric ecosystem, app developers have an urgent requirement to optimize their release strategy to maximize the success opportunity of their apps. To address this problem, we introduce an approach to assisting developers to…
Numerous studies demonstrated that browser fingerprinting is detrimental to users' security and privacy. However, little is known about the effects of browser fingerprinting on Android hybrid apps -- where a stripped-down Chromium browser…
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…