Related papers: Web APIs in Android through the Lens of Security

[Background] Web communication is universal in cyberspace, and security risks in this domain are devastating. [Aims] We analyzed the prevalence of six security smells in mobile app servers, and we investigated the consequence of these…

Many Android applications embed webpages via WebView components and execute JavaScript code within Android. Hybrid applications leverage dedicated APIs to load a resource and render it in a WebView. Furthermore, Android objects can be…

HTTP headers are commonly used to establish web communications, and some of them are relevant for security. However, we have only little information about the usage and support of security-relevant headers in mobile applications. We…

Cryptography has been extensively used in Android applications to guarantee secure communications, conceal critical data from reverse engineering, or ensure mobile users' privacy. Various system-based and third-party libraries for Android…

As privacy features in Android operating system improve, privacy-invasive apps may gradually shift their focus to non-standard and covert channels for leaking private user/device information. Such leaks also remain largely undetected by…

Networked applications interact with the TCP/IP stack through the socket API. Over the years, various extensions have been added to this popular API. In this paper, we propose and implement the TCPSnitch software that tracks the…

Due to the frequent encountering of web URLs in various application scenarios (e.g., chatting and email reading), many mobile apps build their in-app browsing interfaces (IABIs) to provide a seamless user experience. Although this achieves…

Privacy concerns have long been expressed around smart devices, and the concerns around Android apps have been studied by many past works. Over the past 10 years, we have crawled and scraped data for almost 1.9 million apps, and also stored…

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…

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…

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…

Third-party security apps are an integral part of the Android app ecosystem. Many users install them as an extra layer of protection for their devices. There are hundreds of such security apps, both free and paid in Google Play Store and…

Mobile applications, particularly those from social media platforms such as WeChat and TikTok, are evolving into "super apps" that offer a wide range of services such as instant messaging and media sharing, e-commerce, e-learning, and…

A growing concern with advertisement libraries on Android is their ability to exfiltrate personal information from their host applications. While previous work has looked at the libraries' abilities to measure private information on their…

Android apps are built on APIs that abstract core Android system functionalities. These APIs are officially documented in multiple files distributed with the Android source code or SDK, which we collectively refer to as Android API Lists…

HTML5-based mobile apps become more and more popular, mostly because they are much easier to be ported across different mobile platforms than native apps. HTML5-based apps are implemented using the standard web technologies, including…

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…

This paper reports a large-scale study that aims to understand how mobile application (app) vulnerabilities are associated with software libraries. We analyze both free and paid apps. Studying paid apps was quite meaningful because it…

Recent studies have revealed that 87 % to 96 % of the Android apps using cryptographic APIs have a misuse which may cause security vulnerabilities. As previous studies did not conduct a qualitative examination of the validity and severity…

Securing browsers in mobile devices is very challenging, because these browser apps usually provide browsing services to other apps in the same device. A malicious app installed in a device can potentially obtain sensitive information…