Related papers: Taming the Android AppStore: Lightweight Character…
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,…
Mobile applications (hereafter, apps) collect a plethora of information regarding the user behavior and his device through third-party analytics libraries. However, the collection and usage of such data raised several privacy concerns,…
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…
The battle to mitigate Android malware has become more critical with the emergence of new strains incorporating increasingly sophisticated evasion techniques, in turn necessitating more advanced detection capabilities. Hence, in this paper…
While there have been various studies towards Android apps and their development, there is limited discussion of the broader class of apps that fall in the fake area. Fake apps and their development are distinct from official apps and…
China is one of the largest Android markets in the world. As Chinese users cannot access Google Play to buy and install Android apps, a number of independent app stores have emerged and compete in the Chinese app market. Some of the Chinese…
The proliferation of mobile applications and the subsequent sharing of personal data with service and application providers have given rise to substantial privacy concerns. Application marketplaces have introduced mechanisms to conform to…
Cryptography has been extensively used in Android applications to guarantee secure communications, conceal critical data from reverse engineering, or ensure mobile users' privacy. Various system-based and third-party libraries for Android…
Analyzing Android applications for malicious behavior is an important area of research, and is made difficult, in part, by the increasingly large number of applications available for the platform. While techniques exist to perform static…
Mobile malware has been growing in scale and complexity as smartphone usage continues to rise. Android has surpassed other mobile platforms as the most popular whilst also witnessing a dramatic increase in malware targeting the platform. A…
Increasing interest in securing the Android ecosystem has spawned numerous efforts to assist app developers in building secure apps. These efforts have resulted in tools and techniques capable of detecting vulnerabilities (and malicious…
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…
Android is becoming ubiquitous and currently has the largest share of the mobile OS market with billions of application downloads from the official app market. It has also become the platform most targeted by mobile malware that are…
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…
Android is the most popular mobile operating system in the world, running on more than 70% of mobile devices. This implies a gigantic and very competitive market for Android apps. Being successful in such a market is far from trivial and…
As smartphones become increasingly more powerful, a new generation of highly interactive user-centric mobile apps emerge to make user's life simpler and more productive. Mobile phones applications have to sustain limited resource…
While smartphone usage become more and more pervasive, people start also asking to which extent such devices can be maliciously exploited as "tracking devices". The concern is not only related to an adversary taking physical or remote…
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…
Data driven research on Android has gained a great momentum these years. The abundance of data facilitates knowledge learning, however, also increases the difficulty of data preprocessing. Therefore, it is non-trivial to prepare a demanding…
"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…