Related papers: An Analysis of Pre-installed Android Software
The number of Android smartphone and tablet users has experienced a rapid growth in the past few years and it raises users' awareness on the privacy and security of their mobile devices. The features of openness and extensibility make…
Many Android applications collect data from users. When they do, they must protect this collected data according to the current legal frameworks. Such data protection has become even more important since the European Union rolled out the…
In the realm of mobile security, where OS-based protections have proven insufficient against robust attackers, Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) have emerged as a hardware-based security technology. Despite the industry's persistence in…
In this paper, we seek to better understand Android obfuscation and depict a holistic view of the usage of obfuscation through a large-scale investigation in the wild. In particular, we focus on four popular obfuscation approaches:…
Existing research typically treats privacy policies as flat, uniform text, extracting information without regard for the document's logical hierarchy. Disregard for structural cues of section headings designed to guide the reader, often…
With the expansion of the market share occupied by the Android platform, security issues (especially application security) have become attention focus of researchers. In fact, the existing methods lack the capabilities to manage application…
Online advertisers and analytics services (or trackers), are constantly tracking users activities as they access web services either through browsers or a mobile apps. Numerous tools such as browser plugins and specialized mobile apps have…
While the literature on permissions from the end-user perspective is rich, there is a lack of empirical research on why developers request permissions, their conceptualization of permissions, and how their perspectives compare with…
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…
Android is a widely deployed operating system that employs a permission-based access control model. The Android Permissions System (APS) is responsible for mediating resource requests from applications. APS is a critical component of the…
Mobile applications (apps) have become deeply personal, constantly demanding access to privacy-sensitive information in exchange for more personalized user experiences. Such privacy-invading practices have generated major multidimensional…
End-users seldom read verbose privacy policies, leading app stores like Google Play to mandate simplified data safety declarations as a user-friendly alternative. However, these self-declared disclosures often contradict the full privacy…
Software aging -- the phenomenon affecting many long-running systems, causing performance degradation or an increasing failure rate over mission time, and eventually leading to failure - is known to affect mobile devices and their operating…
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…
Today's mobile platforms provide only coarse-grained permissions to users with regard to how third- party applications use sensitive private data. Unfortunately, it is easy to disguise malware within the boundaries of legitimately-granted…
Software systems are ubiquitous, and their use is ingrained in our everyday lives. They enable us to get in touch with people quickly and easily, support us in gathering information, and help us perform our daily tasks. In return, we…
Mobile applications (apps) have become an essential part of everyday life, offering convenient access to services such as banking, healthcare, and shopping. With these apps handling sensitive personal and financial data, ensuring their…
Mobile software engineering has been a hot research topic for decades. Our fellow researchers have proposed various approaches (with over 7,000 publications for Android alone) in this field that essentially contributed to the great success…
Prior studies on mobile app analysis often analyze apps across different categories or focus on a small set of apps within a category. These studies either provide general insights for an entire app store which consists of millions of apps,…
Android users are increasingly concerned with the privacy of their data and security of their devices. To improve the security awareness of users, recent automatic techniques produce security-centric descriptions by performing program…