Related papers: MadDroid: Characterising and Detecting Devious Ad …

Android Malware has emerged as a consequence of the increasing popularity of smartphones and tablets. While most previous work focuses on inherent characteristics of Android apps to detect malware, this study analyses indirect features and…

Privacy, security, and accessibility, like ethical concerns in mobile applications (a.k.a. apps), commonly subsumed under non-functional requirements, are generally reported by users through app reviews available in app stores. However,…

Mobile apps are now ubiquitous. Before developing a new app, the development team usually endeavors painstaking efforts to review many existing apps with similar purposes. The review process is crucial in the sense that it reduces market…

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…

Mobile gaming apps are woven into children's daily lives. Given their ongoing cognitive and emotional development, children are especially vulnerable and depend on designs that safeguard their well-being. When apps feature manipulative…

The packaging model of Android apps requires the entire code necessary for the execution of an app to be shipped into one single apk file. Thus, an analysis of Android apps often visits code which is not part of the functionality delivered…

Despite the growing threat posed by Android malware, the research community is still lacking a comprehensive view of common behaviors and trends exposed by malware families active on the platform. Without such view, the researchers incur…

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…

The Android market is a place where developers offer paid and-or free apps to users. Free apps are interesting to users because they can try them immediately without incurring a monetary cost. However, free apps often have limited features…

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…

Mobile apps are essential in daily life but frequently employ deceptive patterns, such as visual emphasis or linguistic nudging, to manipulate user behavior. Existing research largely relies on manual detection, which is time-consuming and…

DroidDissector is an extraction tool for both static and dynamic features. The aim is to provide Android malware researchers and analysts with an integrated tool that can extract all of the most widely used features in Android malware…

In this work, we are focusing on a new and yet uncovered way for malicious apps to gain profit. They claim to be dating apps. However, their sole purpose is to lure users into purchasing premium/VIP services to start conversations with…

Mobile app markets host millions of apps, yet undesired behaviors (e.g., disruptive ads, illegal redirection, payment deception) remain hard to catch because they often do not rely on permission-protected APIs and can be easily camouflaged…

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…

In recent years, there has been rapid growth in mobile devices such as smartphones, and a number of applications are developed specifically for the smartphone market. In particular, there are many applications that are ``free'' to the user,…

Thousands of malicious applications targeting mobile devices, including the popular Android platform, are created every day. A large number of those applications are created by a small number of professional under-ground actors, however…

Ads are an important revenue source for mobile app development, especially for free apps, whose expense can be compensated by ad revenue. The ad benefits also carry with costs. For example, too many ads can interfere the user experience,…

AI methods have been proven to yield impressive performance on Android malware detection. However, most AI-based methods make predictions of suspicious samples in a black-box manner without transparency on models' inference. The expectation…

In this paper, we propose to identify compromised mobile devices from a network administrator's point of view. Intuitively, inadvertent users (and thus their devices) who download apps through untrustworthy markets are often allured to…