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Web communication has become an indispensable characteristic of mobile apps. However, it is not clear what data the apps transmit, to whom, and what consequences such transmissions have. We analyzed the web communications found in mobile…
The Android operating system is currently the most popular mobile operating system in the world. Android is based on Linux and therefore inherits its features including its Inter-Process Communication (IPC) mechanisms. These mechanisms are…
The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the most important protocols in today's Internet. Its specification and implementations have been refined for almost forty years. The Linux TCP stack is one of the most widely used TCP…
Recent industrial and academic research has focused on data-driven analytics with smartphones by collecting user interaction, context, and device systems data through Application Programming interfaces (APIs) and sensors. The Android OS…
Android has been the most popular smartphone system, with multiple platform versions (e.g., KITKAT and Lollipop) active in the market. To manage the application's compatibility with one or more platform versions, Android allows apps to…
Privacy concerns have long been expressed around smart devices, and the concerns around Android apps have been studied by many past works. Over the past 10 years, we have crawled and scraped data for almost 1.9 million apps, and also stored…
Mobile applications, particularly those from social media platforms such as WeChat and TikTok, are evolving into "super apps" that offer a wide range of services such as instant messaging and media sharing, e-commerce, e-learning, and…
Most end devices are now equipped with multiple network interfaces. Applications can exploit all available interfaces and benefit from multipath transmission. Recently Multipath TCP (MPTCP) was proposed to implement multipath transmission…
Due to Android's open source feature and low barriers to entry for developers, millions of developers and third-party organizations have been attracted into the Android ecosystem. However, over 90 percent of mobile malware are found…
Android apps are built on APIs that abstract core Android system functionalities. These APIs are officially documented in multiple files distributed with the Android source code or SDK, which we collectively refer to as Android API Lists…
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…
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…
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…
In today's Internet, mobile devices are connected to multiple access networks, e.g., WiFi/DSL and LTE. To take advantage of the networks' diverse paths characteristics (delay, bandwidth, and reliability) and aggregate bandwidth, we need…
Android allows apps to communicate with its system services via system service helpers so that these apps can use various functions provided by the system services. Meanwhile, the system services rely on their service helpers to enforce…
Mobile phones have developed into complex platforms with large numbers of installed applications and a wide range of sensitive data. Application security policies limit the permissions of each installed application. As applications may…
Android applications may leak privacy data carelessly or maliciously. In this work we perform inter-component data-flow analysis to detect privacy leaks between components of Android applications. Unlike all current approaches, our tool,…
Tracing the sequence of library and system calls that a program makes is very helpful in the characterization of its interactions with the surrounding environment and ultimately of its semantics. Due to entanglements of real-world software…
Android is designed with a number of built-in security features such as app sandboxing and permission-based access controls. Android supports multiple communication methods for apps to cooperate. This creates a security risk of app…
Relying on ubiquitous Internet connectivity, applications on mobile devices frequently perform web requests during their execution. They fetch data for users to interact with, invoke remote functionalities, or send user-generated content or…