Related papers: Improving the Reliability of Mobility Applications
The application layer of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a growing source of security vulnerabilities, as developers often neglect to implement critical protections such as encryption, authentication, and freshness. While formal verification…
Android is a widely used operating system that employs a permission-based access control model. The Android Permissions System (APS) is responsible for mediating application resource requests. APS is a critical component of the Android…
The inception of a mobile app often takes form of a mock-up of the Graphical User Interface (GUI), represented as a static image delineating the proper layout and style of GUI widgets that satisfy requirements. Following this initial…
Enabling fully automated testing of mobile applications has recently become an important topic of study for both researchers and practitioners. A plethora of tools and approaches have been proposed to aid mobile developers both by…
Smartphones are becoming necessary tools in the daily lives of mil-lions of users who rely on these devices and their applications. There are thou-sands of applications for smartphone devices such as the iPhone, Blackberry, and Android,…
We describe a workflow used to analyze the source code of the {\sc Android OS kernel} and rate for a particular kind of bugginess that exposes a program to hacking. The workflow represents a novel approach for components' vulnerability…
Intense competition in the mobile apps market means it is important to maintain high levels of app reliability to avoid losing users. Yet despite its importance, app reliability is underexplored in the research literature. To address this…
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…
We present Unit-B, a formal method inspired by Event-B and UNITY. Unit-B aims at the stepwise design of software systems satisfying safety and liveness properties. The method features the novel notion of coarse and fine schedules, a…
In order to protect user privacy on mobile devices, an event-driven implicit authentication scheme is proposed in this paper. Several methods of utilizing the scheme for recognizing legitimate user behavior are investigated. The…
Mobile applications are being used every day by more than half of the world's population to perform a great variety of tasks. With the increasingly widespread usage of these applications, the need arises for efficient techniques to test…
Bugs that surface in mobile applications can be difficult to reproduce and fix due to several confounding factors including the highly GUI-driven nature of mobile apps, varying contextual states, differing platform versions and device…
Developing interactive applications (apps) against event-driven software frameworks such as Android is notoriously difficult. To create apps that behave as expected, developers must follow complex and often implicit asynchronous programming…
The permission mechanism in the Android Framework is integral to safeguarding the privacy of users by managing users' and processes' access to sensitive resources and operations. As such, developers need to be equipped with an in-depth…
File-based encryption (FBE) schemes have been developed by software vendors to address security concerns related to data storage. While methods of encrypting data-at-rest may seem relatively straightforward, the main proponents of these…
Google's Android is a comprehensive software framework for mobile communication devices (i.e., smartphones, PDAs). The Android framework includes an operating system, middleware and a set of key applications. The incorporation of integrated…
Effectively measuring, understanding, and improving mobile app performance is of paramount importance for mobile app developers. Across the mobile Internet landscape, companies run online controlled experiments (A/B tests) with thousands of…
Android is a platform for mobile devices that captures more than 85% of the total market-share. Currently, mobile devices allow people to develop multiple tasks in different areas. Regrettably, the benefits of using mobile devices are…
In Android, communications between apps and system services are supported by a transaction-based Inter-Process Communication (IPC) mechanism. Binder, as the cornerstone of this IPC mechanism, separates two communicating parties as client…
The ubiquity of smartphones, and their very broad capabilities and usage, make the security of these devices tremendously important. Unfortunately, despite all progress in security and privacy mechanisms, vulnerabilities continue to…