Related papers: Ripple: Reflection Analysis for Android Apps in In…

Android employs a permission framework that empowers users to either accept or deny sharing their private data (for example, location) with an app. However, many apps tend to crash when they are denied permission, leaving users no choice…

Contemporary mobile applications (apps) are designed to track, use, and share users' data, often without their consent, which results in potential privacy and transparency issues. To investigate whether mobile apps have always been…

Mobile application security has been one of the major areas of security research in the last decade. Numerous application analysis tools have been proposed in response to malicious, curious, or vulnerable apps. However, existing tools, and…

Static analysis, a fundamental technique in Android app examination, enables the extraction of control flows, data flows, and inter-component communications (ICCs), all of which are essential for malware detection. However, existing methods…

In this paper, we seek to better understand Android obfuscation and depict a holistic view of the usage of obfuscation through a large-scale investigation in the wild. In particular, we focus on four popular obfuscation approaches:…

Mobile databases are the statutory backbones of many applications on smartphones, and they store a lot of sensitive information. However, vulnerabilities in the operating system or the app logic can lead to sensitive data leakage by giving…

Inter-Component Communication (ICC) is a key mechanism in Android. It enables developers to compose rich functionalities and explore reuse within and across apps. Unfortunately, as reported by a large body of literature, ICC is rather…

Android is undergoing unprecedented malicious threats daily, but the existing methods for malware detection often fail to cope with evolving camouflage in malware. To address this issue, we present HAWK, a new malware detection framework…

Smartphone apps usually have access to sensitive user data such as contacts, geo-location, and account credentials and they might share such data to external entities through the Internet or with other apps. Confidentiality of user data…

Mobile phones and tablets have become the most widely used computing devices, with a large predominance of the Android platform. As a natural evolution, the development of Android applications has surged and has become a major field of…

A common security architecture is based on the protection of certain resources by permission checks (used e.g., in Android and Blackberry). It has some limitations, for instance, when applications are granted more permissions than they…

The existence of native code in Android apps plays an important role in triggering inconspicuous propagation of secrets and circumventing malware detection. However, the state-of-the-art information-flow analysis tools for Android apps all…

Classifying mobile apps based on their description is beneficial for several purposes. However, many app descriptions do not reflect app functionalities, whether accidentally or on purpose. Most importantly, these app classification methods…

The security of Android has been recently challenged by the discovery of a number of vulnerabilities involving different layers of the Android stack. We argue that such vulnerabilities are largely related to the interplay among layers…

The apps installed on a smartphone can reveal much information about a user, such as their medical conditions, sexual orientation, or religious beliefs. Additionally, the presence or absence of particular apps on a smartphone can inform an…

Sophisticated malware families exploit the openness of the Android platform to infiltrate IoT networks, enabling large-scale disruption, data exfiltration, and denial-of-service attacks. This systematic literature review (SLR) examines…

When machine learning is used for Android malware detection, an app needs to be represented in a numerical format for training and testing. We identify a widespread occurrence of distinct Android apps that have identical or nearly identical…

Third-party security apps are an integral part of the Android app ecosystem. Many users install them as an extra layer of protection for their devices. There are hundreds of such security apps, both free and paid in Google Play Store and…

The rise of mobile apps has brought greater convenience and many options for users. However, many apps use analytics services to collect a wide range of user interaction data, with privacy policies often failing to reveal the types of…

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…