Related papers: Policy Enforcement with Proactive Libraries
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…
Android applications are executed on smartphones equipped with a variety of resources that must be properly accessed and controlled, otherwise the correctness of the executions and the stability of the entire environment might be negatively…
Developers rely on third-party library Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) when developing software. However, libraries typically come with assumptions and API usage constraints, whose violation results in API misuse. API misuses may…
Context: Refactoring is recognized as an effective practice to maintain evolving software systems. For software libraries, we study how library developers refactor their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), especially when it impacts…
The packaging model of Android apps requires the entire code necessary for the execution of an app to be shipped into one single apk file. Thus, an analysis of Android apps often visits code which is not part of the functionality delivered…
The widespread use of artificial intelligence (AI) in many domains has revealed numerous ethical issues from data and design to deployment. In response, countless broad principles and guidelines for ethical AI have been published, and…
Smart environment applications demand novel solutions for managing quality of services, especially availability and reliability at run-time. The underlying systems are changing dynamically due to addition and removal of system components,…
Being able to automatically detect the performance issues in apps can significantly improve apps' quality as well as having a positive influence on user satisfaction. Application Performance Management (APM) libraries are used to locate the…
Machine Learning software systems are frequently used in our day-to-day lives. Some of these systems are used in various sensitive environments to make life-changing decisions. Therefore, it is crucial to ensure that these AI/ML systems do…
Runtime enforcement can be effectively used to improve the reliability of software applications. However, it often requires the definition of ad hoc policies and enforcement strategies, which might be expensive to identify and implement.…
Industrial applications heavily integrate open-source software libraries nowadays. Beyond the benefits that libraries bring, they can also impose a real threat in case a library is affected by a vulnerability but its community is not active…
We describe Active Libraries, which take an active role in compilation. Unlike traditional libraries which are passive collections of functions and objects, Active Libraries may generate components, specialize algorithms, optimize code,…
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…
This paper reports a large-scale study that aims to understand how mobile application (app) vulnerabilities are associated with software libraries. We analyze both free and paid apps. Studying paid apps was quite meaningful because it…
This paper investigates changes over time in the behavior of Android ad libraries. Taking a sample of 100,000 apps, we extract and classify the ad libraries. By considering the release dates of the applications that use a specific ad…
As applications grow in capability, they also grow in complexity. This complexity in turn gets pushed into modules and libraries. In addition, hardware configurations become increasingly elaborate, too. These two trends make understanding,…
In the current software development environment, third-party libraries play a crucial role. They provide developers with rich functionality and convenient solutions, speeding up the pace and efficiency of software development. However, with…
Geo-replicated systems provide a number of desirable properties such as globally low latency, high availability, scalability, and built-in fault tolerance. Unfortunately, programming correct applications on top of such systems has proven to…
Policy enforcers are sophisticated runtime components that can prevent failures by enforcing the correct behavior of the software. While a single enforcer can be easily designed focusing only on the behavior of the application that must be…
Application Programming Interface (API) incompatibility is a long-standing issue in Android application development. The rapid evolution of Android APIs results in a significant number of API additions, removals, and changes between…