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To build energy-efficient apps, there is a need to estimate and analyze their energy consumption in typical usage scenarios. The energy consumption of Android apps could be estimated via software-based and hardware-based approaches.…
Digital lending applications, commonly referred to as loan apps, have become a primary channel for microcredit in emerging markets. However, many of these apps demand excessive permissions and misuse sensitive user data for coercive…
Context: Refactoring is recognized as an effective practice to maintain evolving software systems. For software libraries, we study how library developers refactor their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), especially when it impacts…
Smartphone apps usually have access to sensitive user data such as contacts, geo-location, and account credentials and they might share such data to external entities through the Internet or with other apps. Confidentiality of user data…
With the continuous growth in the usage of Android apps, ensuring their security has become critically important. An increasing number of malicious apps adopt anti-analysis techniques to evade security measures. Although some research has…
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…
With the increasing usage of smartphones a plethora of security solutions are being designed and developed. Many of the security solutions fail to cope with advanced attacks and are not aways properly designed for smartphone platforms.…
Many cybersecurity breaches occur due to users not following good cybersecurity practices, chief among them being regulations for applying software patches to operating systems, updating applications, and maintaining strong passwords. We…
We describe Active Libraries, which take an active role in compilation. Unlike traditional libraries which are passive collections of functions and objects, Active Libraries may generate components, specialize algorithms, optimize code,…
Many phone vendors use Android as their underlying OS, but often extend it to add new functionality and to make it compatible with their specific phones. When a new version of Android is released, phone vendors need to merge or re-apply…
Despite regulatory efforts to establish reliable content-rating guidelines for mobile apps, the process of assigning content ratings in the Google Play Store remains self-regulated by the app developers. There is no straightforward method…
As data privacy continues to be a crucial human-right concern as recognized by the UN, regulatory agencies have demanded developers obtain user permission before accessing user-sensitive data. Mainly through the use of privacy policies…
Autonomous agents have become increasingly important for interacting with the real world. Android agents, in particular, have been recently a frequently-mentioned interaction method. However, existing studies for training and evaluating…
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…
Conventional approaches for ensuring the security of application software at run-time, through monitoring, either produce (high rates of) false alarms (e.g. intrusion detection systems) or limit application performance (e.g. run-time…
"Incentivized" advertising platforms allow mobile app developers to acquire new users by directly paying users to install and engage with mobile apps (e.g., create an account, make in-app purchases). Incentivized installs are banned by the…
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…
We present lifestate rules--an approach for abstracting event-driven object protocols. Developing applications against event-driven software frameworks is notoriously difficult. One reason why is that to create functioning applications,…
Popularity and complexity of malicious mobile applications are rising, making their analysis difficult and labor intensive. Mobile application analysis is indeed inherently different from desktop application analysis: In the latter, the…
With the rapid development of online technologies and the widespread usage of mobile phones among children, it is crucial to protect their online safety. Some studies reported that online abuse and incidents negatively affect children's…