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Mobile gaming applications (apps) have become increasingly pervasive, including a growing number of games designed for children. Despite their popularity, these apps often integrate complex analytics, advertising, and attribution…

We study the temporal dynamics of potentially harmful apps (PHAs) on Android by leveraging 8.8M daily on-device detections collected among 11.7M customers of a popular mobile security product between 2019 and 2020. We show that the current…

The android operating system is being installed in most of the smart devices. The introduction of intrusions in such operating systems is rising at a tremendous rate. With the introduction of such malicious data streams, the smart devices…

Mobile apps are predominantly integrated with cloud services to benefit from enhanced functionalities. Adopting authentication using secrets such as API keys is crucial to ensure secure mobile-cloud interactions. However, developers often…

With the rapid advancement of machine learning (ML), ML-based Android malware detection has gained significant popularity due to its ability to automatically learn malicious patterns from Android apps. However, the lack of an in-depth and…

The advent of large-scale, complex computing systems has dramatically increased the difficulties of securing accesses to systems' resources. To ensure confidentiality and integrity, the exploitation of access control mechanisms has thus…

Cross-app collaboration via inter-component communication is a fundamental mechanism on Android. Although it brings the benefits such as functionality reuse and data sharing, a threat called component hijacking is also introduced. By…

Android apps require permissions when accessing resources related to privacy or system integrity. Starting from Android 6, these permissions have to be asked at runtime. However, migrating to the new permission model poses multiple…

Repackaging is a serious threat to the Android ecosystem as it deprives app developers of their benefits, contributes to spreading malware on users' devices, and increases the workload of market maintainers. In the space of six years, the…

Computing platforms such as smartphones frequently access Web content using many separate applications rather than a single Web browser application. These applications often deal with sensitive user information such as financial data or…

The login functionality, being the gateway to app usage, plays a critical role in both user experience and application security. As Android apps increasingly incorporate login functionalities, they support a variety of authentication…

Android applications are executed on smartphones equipped with a variety of resources that must be properly accessed and controlled, otherwise the correctness of the executions and the stability of the entire environment might be negatively…

The rise in popularity of the Android platform has resulted in an explosion of malware threats targeting it. As both Android malware and the operating system itself constantly evolve, it is very challenging to design robust malware…

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…

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…

Traditional authorization policies are user-centric, in the sense that authorization is defined, ultimately, in terms of user identities. We believe that this user-centric approach is inappropriate for many applications, and that what…

The Android permission system is a set of controls to regulate access to sensitive data and platform resources (e.g., camera). The fast evolving nature of Android permissions, coupled with inadequate documentation, results in numerous…

Mobile apps can access a wide variety of secure information, such as contacts and location. However, current mobile platforms include only coarse access control mechanisms to protect such data. In this paper, we introduce interaction-based…

Android is among the popular platforms running on millions of smart devices, like smartphones and tablets, whose widespread adoption is seen as an opportunity for spreading malware. Adding malicious payloads to cracked applications, often…

A common security architecture is based on the protection of certain resources by permission checks (used e.g., in Android and Blackberry). It has some limitations, for instance, when applications are granted more permissions than they…