Related papers: Characterizing SEAndroid Policies in the Wild
There is a growing interest in device-control systems that can interpret human natural language instructions and execute them on a digital device by directly controlling its user interface. We present a dataset for device-control research,…
Android is among the popular platforms running on millions of smart devices, like smartphones and tablets, whose widespread adoption is seen as an opportunity for spreading malware. Adding malicious payloads to cracked applications, often…
Fragmentation is a serious problem in the Android ecosystem. This problem is mainly caused by the fast evolution of the system itself and the various customizations independently maintained by different smartphone manufacturers. Many…
Cross-app collaboration via inter-component communication is a fundamental mechanism on Android. Although it brings the benefits such as functionality reuse and data sharing, a threat called component hijacking is also introduced. By…
Android is the predominant mobile operating system for the past few years. The prevalence of devices that can be powered by Android magnetized not merely application developers but also malware developers with criminal intention to design…
Due to the amount of data that smartphone applications can potentially access, platforms enforce permission systems that allow users to regulate how applications access protected resources. If users are asked to make security decisions too…
Precise access control decisions are crucial for the security of both traditional applications and emerging agent-based systems. Typically, these decisions are made by users during app installation or at runtime. However, due to the…
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…
In the realm of mobile security, where OS-based protections have proven insufficient against robust attackers, Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) have emerged as a hardware-based security technology. Despite the industry's persistence in…
There are over 1.2 million applications on the Google Play store today with a large number of competing applications for any given use or function. This creates challenges for users in selecting the right application. Moreover, some of the…
Inter-app communication is a mandatory and security-critical functionality of operating systems, such as Android. On the application level, Android implements this facility through Intents, which can also transfer non-primitive objects…
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…
Android is nowadays the most popular operating system in the world, not only in the realm of mobile devices, but also when considering desktop and laptop computers. Such a popularity makes it an attractive target for security attacks, also…
The Android middleware, in particular the so-called systemserver, is a crucial and central component to Android's security and robustness. To understand whether the systemserver provides the demanded security properties, it has to be…
Various studies have empirically shown that the majority of Java and Android apps misuse cryptographic libraries, causing devastating breaches of data security. Therefore, it is crucial to detect such misuses early in the development…
Many phone vendors use Android as their underlying OS, but often extend it to add new functionality and to make it compatible with their specific phones. When a new version of Android is released, phone vendors need to merge or re-apply…
Mobile gaming apps increasingly rely on third-party Software Development Kits SDKs for advertising, analytics, attribution, and user engagement, potentially introducing privacy exposure beyond traditional permission based risks. Existing…
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…
Since Google unveiled Android OS for smartphones, malware are thriving with 3Vs, i.e. volume, velocity, and variety. A recent report indicates that one out of every five business/industry mobile application leaks sensitive personal data.…
With mobile applications and associated services becoming increasingly popular, concerns are being raised about private data leakages have raised. Previous solutions to this well-known set of problems have approached it from the ground up…