Related papers: BinderCracker: Assessing the Robustness of Android…
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…
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…
Widely used payment splitting apps allow members of a group to keep track of debts between members by sending charges for expenses paid by one member on behalf of others. While offering a great deal of convenience, these apps gain access to…
Android has been the most popular smartphone system with multiple platform versions active in the market. To manage the application's compatibility with one or more platform versions, Android allows apps to declare the supported platform…
Interprocess communication, IPC, is one of the most fundamental functions of a modern operating system, playing an essential role in the fabric of contemporary applications. This report conducts an investigation in FreeBSD of the real world…
Protected user-level libraries have been proposed as a way to allow mutually distrusting applications to safely share kernel-bypass services. In this paper, we identify and solve several previously unaddressed obstacles to realizing this…
Mobile devices have become ubiquitous due to centralization of private user information, contacts, messages and multiple sensors. Google Android, an open-source mobile Operating System (OS), is currently the market leader. Android…
Unique challenges arise when testing mobile applications due to their prevailing event-driven nature and complex contextual features (e.g. sensors, notifications). Current automated input generation approaches for Android apps are typically…
Dynamic analysis has emerged as a pivotal technique for testing Android apps, enabling the detection of bugs, malicious code, and vulnerabilities. A key metric in evaluating the efficacy of tools employed by both research and practitioner…
Smartphones hold important private information, yet users routinely expose this information to questionable applications written by developers they know nothing about. Users may be tempted to think of smartphones as old-style dumb phones,…
Android Framework is a layer of software that exists in every Android system managing resources of all Android apps. A vulnerability in Android Framework can lead to severe hacks, such as destroying user data and leaking private…
Context: Post-release user feedback plays an integral role in improving software quality and informing new features. Given its growing importance, feedback concerning security enhancements is particularly noteworthy. In considering the…
Mobile developers face unique challenges when detecting and reporting crashes in apps due to their prevailing GUI event-driven nature and additional sources of inputs (e.g., sensor readings). To support developers in these tasks, we…
With millions of apps that can be downloaded from official or third-party market, Android has become one of the most popular mobile platforms today. These apps help people in all kinds of ways and thus have access to lots of user's data…
The rapid expansion of connected devices has amplified the need for robust and scalable security frameworks. This paper proposes a holistic approach to securing network-connected devices, covering essential layers: hardware, firmware,…
Intense competition in the mobile apps market means it is important to maintain high levels of app reliability to avoid losing users. Yet despite its importance, app reliability is underexplored in the research literature. To address this…
Decentralized applications (dApps) consist of smart contracts that run on blockchains and clients that model collaborating parties. dApps are used to model financial and legal business functionality. Today, contracts and clients are written…
Network-facing applications are commonly exposed to all kinds of attacks, especially when connected to the internet. As a result, web servers like Nginx or client applications such as curl make every effort to secure and harden their code…
Despite our growing reliance on mobile phones for a wide range of daily tasks, their operation remains largely opaque. A number of previous studies have addressed elements of this problem in a partial fashion, trading off analytic…
Modern blockchain applications are often constrained by a trade-off between user experience and trust. Chainless Apps present a new paradigm of application architecture that separates execution, trust, bridging, and settlement into distinct…