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Although there are over 1,600,000 third-party Android apps in the Google Play Store, little has been conclusively shown about how their individual (and collective) permission usage has evolved over time. Recently, Android 6 overhauled the…
We show that the new hover (floating touch) technology, available in a number of today's smartphone models, can be abused by any Android application running with a common SYSTEM_ALERT_WINDOW permission to record all touchscreen input into…
Numerous studies demonstrated that browser fingerprinting is detrimental to users' security and privacy. However, little is known about the effects of browser fingerprinting on Android hybrid apps -- where a stripped-down Chromium browser…
The transparency and privacy behavior of mobile browsers has remained widely unexplored by the research community. In fact, as opposed to regular Android apps, mobile browsers may present contradicting privacy behaviors. On the one end,…
The open-source nature of the Android OS makes it possible for manufacturers to ship custom versions of the OS along with a set of pre-installed apps, often for product differentiation. Some device vendors have recently come under scrutiny…
Android employs a permission framework that empowers users to either accept or deny sharing their private data (for example, location) with an app. However, many apps tend to crash when they are denied permission, leaving users no choice…
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…
Smartphone manufacturer provided default features (e.g., default location services, iCloud, Google Assistant, ad tracking) enhance the usability and extend the functionality of these devices. Prior studies have highlighted smartphone…
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…
With the development of foundation AI technologies, task-executable voice assistants (VAs) have become more popular, enhancing user convenience and expanding device functionality. Android task-executable VAs are applications that are…
The Privacy Sandbox, launched in 2019, is a series of proposals from Google to reduce ``cross-site and cross-app tracking while helping to keep online content and services free for all''. Over the years, Google implemented, experimented,…
In this paper we claim that an efficient and readily applicable means to improve privacy of Android applications is: 1) to perform runtime monitoring by instrumenting the application bytecode and 2) in-vivo, i.e. directly on the smartphone.…
The ubiquity of smartphones, and their very broad capabilities and usage, make the security of these devices tremendously important. Unfortunately, despite all progress in security and privacy mechanisms, vulnerabilities continue to…
String obfuscation is an established technique used by proprietary, closed-source applications to protect intellectual property. Furthermore, it is also frequently used to hide spyware or malware in applications. In both cases, the…
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…
While extremely valuable to achieve advanced functions, mobile phone sensors can be abused by attackers to implement malicious activities in Android apps, as experimentally demonstrated by many state-of-the-art studies. There is hence a…
Android utilizes a security mechanism that requires apps to request permission for accessing sensitive user data, e.g., contacts and SMSs, or certain system features, e.g., camera and Internet access. However, Android apps tend to be…
With smartphone technologies enhanced way of interacting with the world around us, it has also been paving the way for easier access to our private and personal information. This has been amplified by the existence of numerous embedded…
Privacy labels -- standardized, compact representations of data collection and data use practices -- are often presented as a solution to the shortcomings of privacy policies. Apple introduced mandatory privacy labels for apps in its App…
Mobile Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents have demonstrated strong capabilities in automating complex smartphone tasks by leveraging multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and system-level control interfaces. However, this paradigm…