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The major mobile platforms, Android and iOS, have introduced changes that restrict user tracking to improve user privacy, yet apps continue to covertly track users via device fingerprinting. We study the opportunity to improve this dynamic…
With the proliferation of smart phone, a major growth in the use of apps related to the health category, specifically those concerned with foot health can be observed. Although new, these apps are being used practically for scanning feet…
The number of applications in Google Play has increased dramatically in recent years. On Google Play, users can write detailed reviews and rate apps, with these ratings significantly influencing app success and download numbers. Reviews…
Mini-applications, commonly referred to as mini-apps, are compact software programs embedded within larger applications or platforms, offering targeted functionality without the need for separate installations. Typically web-based or…
Increasing interest in securing the Android ecosystem has spawned numerous efforts to assist app developers in building secure apps. These efforts have resulted in tools and techniques capable of detecting vulnerabilities (and malicious…
In the face of the growing global influence and prevalence of Chinese technology companies, governments worldwide have expressed concern and mistrust toward these companies. There is a scarcity of research that specifically examines the…
[Background] Research on requirements engineering (RE) for mobile apps employs datasets formed by app users, developers or vendors. However, little is known about the sources of these datasets in terms of platforms and the RE activities…
Contact tracing apps are powerful software tools that can help control the spread of COVID-19. In this article, we evaluated 53 COVID-19 contact tracing apps found on the Google Play Store in terms of their usage, rating, access permission,…
Prior works have shown that the list of apps installed by a user reveal a lot about user interests and behavior. These works rely on the semantics of the installed apps and show that various user traits could be learnt automatically using…
Mobile applications (hereafter, apps) collect a plethora of information regarding the user behavior and his device through third-party analytics libraries. However, the collection and usage of such data raised several privacy concerns,…
As the indispensable trading platforms of the ecosystem, hundreds of cryptocurrency exchanges are emerging to facilitate the trading of digital assets. While, it also attracts the attentions of attackers. A number of scam attacks were…
In this paper, we present a comparative analysis of benign and malicious Android applications, based on static features. In particular, we focus our attention on the permissions requested by an application. We consider both binary…
In the first quarter of 2011, Android has become the top-selling operating system for smartphones. In this paper, we present a novel, highly critical attack that allows unprompted installation of arbitrary applications from the Android…
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…
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) aims to ensure that all personal data processing activities are fair and transparent for the European Union (EU) citizens, regardless of whether these are carried out within the EU or anywhere…
In the appstore-centric ecosystem, app developers have an urgent requirement to optimize their release strategy to maximize the success opportunity of their apps. To address this problem, we introduce an approach to assisting developers to…
Emerging trends in smartphones, online maps, social media, and the resulting geo-located data, provide opportunities to collect traces of people's socio-economical activities in a much more granular and direct fashion, triggering a…
Zoom serves millions of users daily and allows third-party developers to integrate their apps with the Zoom client and reach those users. So far, these apps' privacy and security aspects, which can access rich audio-visual data (among…
Android's open-source nature facilitates widespread smartphone accessibility, particularly in price-sensitive markets. System and vendor applications that come pre-installed on budget Android devices frequently operate with elevated…
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…