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In systems owned by normal end-users, many times security attacks are mounted by sneaking in malicious applications or exploiting existing software vulnerabilities through security non-conforming actions of users. Virtualization approaches…
The widespread use of smartphones and tablets has made society heavily reliant on mobile applications (apps) for accessing various resources and services. These apps often handle sensitive personal, financial, and health data, making app…
There are many sandboxing mechanisms provided by operating systems to limit what resources applications can access, however, sometimes the use of these mechanisms requires developers to refactor their code to fit the sandboxing model. In…
Recent studies observe that app foreground is the most striking component that influences the access control decisions in mobile platform, as users tend to deny permission requests lacking visible evidence. However, none of the existing…
It is universally acknowledged that Wi-Fi communications are important to secure. Thus, the Wi-Fi Alliance published WPA3 in 2018 with a distinctive security feature: it leverages a Password-Authenticated Key Exchange (PAKE) protocol to…
Operating Systems enforce logical isolation using abstractions such as processes, containers, and isolation technologies to protect a system from malicious or buggy code. In this paper, we show new types of side channels through the file…
Billions of secure messaging users have adopted end-to-end encryption (E2EE). Nevertheless, challenges remain. Most communication applications do not provide E2EE, and application silos prevent interoperability. Our qualitative analysis of…
Context: As mobile applications (Apps) widely spread over our society and life, various personal information is constantly demanded by Apps in exchange for more intelligent and customized functionality. An increasing number of users are…
Third-party applications have become an essential part of today's online ecosystem, enhancing the functionality of popular platforms. However, the intensive data exchange underlying their proliferation has increased concerns about…
Browser extensions are third party programs, tightly integrated to browsers, where they execute with elevated privileges in order to provide users with additional functionalities. Unlike web applications, extensions are not subject to the…
Smartwatches such as the Apple Watch collect vast amounts of intimate health and fitness data as we wear them. Users have little choice regarding how this data is processed: The Apple Watch can only be used with Apple's iPhones, using their…
Although iOS is the second most popular mobile operating system and is often considered the more secure one, approaches to automatically analyze iOS applications are scarce and generic app analysis frameworks do not exist. This is on the…
Today's mobile platforms provide only coarse-grained permissions to users with regard to how third- party applications use sensitive private data. Unfortunately, it is easy to disguise malware within the boundaries of legitimately-granted…
Mobile banking apps, belonging to the most security-critical app category, render massive and dynamic transactions susceptible to security risks. Given huge potential financial loss caused by vulnerabilities, existing research lacks a…
[Background] Web communication is universal in cyberspace, and security risks in this domain are devastating. [Aims] We analyzed the prevalence of six security smells in mobile app servers, and we investigated the consequence of these…
Android Malware has emerged as a consequence of the increasing popularity of smartphones and tablets. While most previous work focuses on inherent characteristics of Android apps to detect malware, this study analyses indirect features and…
Vetting security impacts introduced by third-party libraries in iOS apps requires a reliable library detection technique. Especially when a new vulnerability (or a privacy-invasive behavior) was discovered in a third-party library, there is…
While most security projects have focused on fending off attacks coming from outside the organizational boundaries, a real threat has arisen from the people who are inside those perimeter protections. Insider threats have shown their power…
Android virtualization enables an app to create a virtual environment, in which other apps can run. Originally designed to overcome the limitations of mobile apps dimensions, malicious developers soon started exploiting this technique to…
Android and Facebook provide third-party applications with access to users' private data and the ability to perform potentially sensitive operations (e.g., post to a user's wall or place phone calls). As a security measure, these platforms…