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Containment, the key strategy in quickly halting an epidemic, requires rapid identification and quarantine of the infected individuals, determination of whom they have had close contact with in the previous days and weeks, and…
Smartphones hold important private information, yet users routinely expose this information to questionable applications written by developers they know nothing about. Users may be tempted to think of smartphones as old-style dumb phones,…
Overnight, Apple has turned its hundreds-of-million-device ecosystem into the world's largest crowd-sourced location tracking network called offline finding (OF). OF leverages online finder devices to detect the presence of missing offline…
Android devices are equipped with many pre-installed applications which have the capability of tracking and monitoring users. Although applications coming pre-installed pose a great danger to user security and privacy, they have received…
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…
Contact tracing is the techno-choice of reference to address the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of the current approaches have severe privacy and security issues and fail to offer a sustainable contact tracing infrastructure. We address these…
Digital contact tracing has emerged as a viable tool supplementing manual contact tracing. To date, more than 100 contact tracing applications have been published to slow down the spread of highly contagious Covid-19. Despite subtle…
Contact tracing promises to help fight the spread of Covid-19 via an early detection of possible contagion events. To this end, most existing solutions share the following architecture: smartphones continuously broadcast random beacons that…
With the requirements and emphases on privacy transparency placed by regulations such as GDPR and CCPA, the Google Play Store requires Android developers to more responsibly communicate their apps' privacy practices to potential users by…
The pandemic in 2020 and 2021 had enormous economic and societal consequences, and studies show that contact tracing algorithms can be key in the early containment of the virus. While large strides have been made towards more effective…
Online services like Google provide a variety of application programming interfaces (APIs). These online APIs enable authenticated third-party services and applications (apps) to access a user's account data for tasks such as single sign-on…
Monitoring location updates from mobile users has important applications in many areas, ranging from public safety and national security to social networks and advertising. However, sensitive information can be derived from movement…
We report on the results of a measurement study carried out on a commuter bus in Dublin, Ireland using the Google/Apple Exposure Notification (GAEN) API. This API is likely to be widely used by Covid-19 contact tracing apps. Measurements…
Location-based Services (LBSs) provide valuable services, with convenient features for users. However, the information disclosed through each request harms user privacy. This is a concern particularly with honest-but-curious LBS servers,…
When users leave their mobile devices unattended, or let others use them momentarily, they are susceptible to privacy breaches. Existing technological defenses, such as unlock authentication or account switching, have proven to be…
A smart grid is an advanced method for supplying electricity to the consumers alleviating the limitations of the existing system. It causes frequent meter reading transmission from the end-user to the supplier. This frequent data…
Sensors embedded in mobile smart devices can monitor users' activity with high accuracy to provide a variety of services to end-users ranging from precise geolocation, health monitoring, and handwritten word recognition. However, this…
Privacy preserving RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) authentication has been an active research area in recent years. Both forward security and backward security are required to maintain the privacy of a tag, i.e., exposure of a tag's…
Mobile location-based services (LBSs) empowered by mobile crowdsourcing provide users with context-aware intelligent services based on user locations. As smartphones are capable of collecting and disseminating massive user location-embedded…
We investigate Apple's Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Continuity protocol, designed to support interoperability and communication between iOS and macOS devices, and show that the price for this seamless experience is leakage of identifying…