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Smartphones and mobile devices are rapidly becoming indispensable devices for many users. Unfortunately, they also become fertile grounds for hackers to deploy malware and to spread virus. There is an urgent need to have a "security…

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 Android middleware, in particular the so-called systemserver, is a crucial and central component to Android's security and robustness. To understand whether the systemserver provides the demanded security properties, it has to be…

Widely-used Android static program analysis tools, e.g., Amandroid and FlowDroid, perform the whole-app inter-procedural analysis that is comprehensive but fundamentally difficult to handle modern (large) apps. The average app size has…

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 large demand of mobile devices creates significant concerns about the quality of mobile applications (apps). Developers need to guarantee the quality of mobile apps before it is released to the market. There have been many approaches…

The rapidly evolving Android malware ecosystem demands high-quality, real-time datasets as a foundation for effective detection and defense. With the widespread adoption of mobile devices across industrial systems, they have become a…

Numerous tools rely on automatic categorization of Android apps as part of their methodology. However, incorrect categorization can lead to inaccurate outcomes, such as a malware detector wrongly flagging a benign app as malicious. One such…

Mobile application security has been a major area of focus for security research over the course of the last decade. Numerous application analysis tools have been proposed in response to malicious, curious, or vulnerable apps. However,…

In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a Systematic Inter-Component Communication Analysis Technology (SIAT) consisting of two key modules: \emph{Monitor} and \emph{Analyzer}. As an extension to the Android operating…

Background. Developers use Automated Static Analysis Tools (ASATs) to control for potential quality issues in source code, including defects and technical debt. Tool vendors have devised quite a number of tools, which makes it harder for…

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…

As the dominant mobile operating system, Android continues to attract a substantial influx of new applications each year. However, this growth is accompanied by increased attention from malicious actors, resulting in a significant rise in…

Software debloating tools seek to improve program security and performance by removing unnecessary code, called bloat. While many techniques have been proposed, several barriers to their adoption have emerged. Namely, debloating tools are…

With the rapid growth of Android malware, many machine learning-based malware analysis approaches are proposed to mitigate the severe phenomenon. However, such classifiers are opaque, non-intuitive, and difficult for analysts to understand…

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…

Resource leaks -- a program does not release resources it previously acquired -- are a common kind of bug in Android applications. Even with the help of existing techniques to automatically detect leaks, writing a leak-free program remains…

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…

The causes of the reproducibility crisis include lack of standardization and transparency in scientific reporting. Checklists such as ARRIVE and CONSORT seek to improve transparency, but they are not always followed by authors and peer…

While extremely valuable to achieve advanced functions, mobile phone sensors can be abused by attackers to implement malicious activities in Android apps, as experimentally demonstrated by many state-of-the-art studies. There is hence a…