Related papers: A First Look at Ad Blocking Apps on Google Play
Android is the most widely used smartphone OS with 82.8% market share in 2015. It is therefore the most widely targeted system by malware authors. Researchers rely on dynamic analysis to extract malware behaviors and often use emulators to…
Mobile apps offer significant benefits, but their privacy protections often remain ineffective and confusing for users. While prior work mainly analyzes app privacy vulnerabilities, few approaches help users understand, set, and enforce…
As third-party cookie blocking is becoming the norm in browsers, advertisers and trackers have started to use first-party cookies for tracking. We conduct a differential measurement study on 10K websites with third-party cookies allowed and…
User tracking is critical in the mobile ecosystem, which relies on device identifiers to build clear user profiles. In earlier ages, Android allowed easy access to non-resettable device identifiers like device serial numbers and IMEI by…
Privacy regulations have led to many websites showing cookie banners to their users. Usually, cookie banners present the user with the option to "accept" or "reject" cookies. Recently, a new form of paywall-like cookie banner has taken hold…
With the requirements and emphases on privacy transparency placed by regulations such as GDPR and CCPA, the Google Play Store requires Android developers to more responsibly communicate their apps' privacy practices to potential users by…
While JavaScript established itself as a cornerstone of the modern web, it also constitutes a major tracking and security vector, thus raising critical privacy and security concerns. In this context, some browser extensions propose to…
Parental control apps, which are mobile apps that allow parents to monitor and restrict their children's activities online, are becoming increasingly adopted by parents as a means of safeguarding their children's online safety. However, it…
In recent years, researchers have developed a number of tools to conduct taint analysis of Android applications. While all the respective papers aim at providing a thorough empirical evaluation, comparability is hindered by varying or…
We are in the dawn of deep learning explosion for smartphones. To bridge the gap between research and practice, we present the first empirical study on 16,500 the most popular Android apps, demystifying how smartphone apps exploit deep…
The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) provides California residents with a range of enhanced privacy protections and rights. Our research investigated the extent to which Android app developers comply with the provisions of the CCPA…
Mobile phones enable the collection of a wealth of private information, from unique identifiers (e.g., email addresses), to a user's location, to their text messages. This information can be harvested by apps and sent to third parties,…
E-commerce mobile applications are central to global financial transactions, making their security and privacy crucial. In this study, we analyze 92 top-grossing Android e-commerce apps (58 U.S.-based and 34 international) using MobSF,…
To protect users' privacy, legislators have regulated the usage of tracking technologies, mandating the acquisition of users' consent before collecting data. Consequently, websites started showing more and more consent management modules --…
Perceptual ad-blocking is a novel approach that detects online advertisements based on their visual content. Compared to traditional filter lists, the use of perceptual signals is believed to be less prone to an arms race with web…
Deep learning has shown its power in many applications, including object detection in images, natural-language understanding, and speech recognition. To make it more accessible to end users, many deep learning models are now embedded in…
Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) are the primary means by which users interact with mobile applications, making them crucial to both app functionality and user experience. However, a major challenge in automated testing is the frequent…
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…
As mobile applications (apps) become ubiquitous in everyday life, it is crucial for developers to prioritize accessibility for users with diverse abilities. While previous research has identified widespread accessibility issues and raised…
This paper introduces adF, a novel system for analyzing the vulnerability of different devices, Operating Systems (OSes), and browsers to web fingerprinting. adF performs its measurements from code inserted in ads. We have used our system…