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As social networking takes to the mobile world, smartphone apps provide users with ever-changing ways to interact with each other. Over the past couple of years, an increasing number of apps have entered the market offering end-to-end…
This report summarizes our findings regarding a severe weakness in implementations of the Open Mobile API deployed on several Android devices. The vulnerability allows arbitrary code coming from a specially crafted Android application…
Due to the continuous improvement of performance and functions, Android remains the most popular operating system on mobile phone today. However, various malicious applications bring great threats to the system. Over the past few years,…
The apps installed on a smartphone can reveal much information about a user, such as their medical conditions, sexual orientation, or religious beliefs. Additionally, the presence or absence of particular apps on a smartphone can inform an…
As technology and technology companies have grown in power, ubiquity, and societal influence, some companies -- and notably some mobile apps -- have come to be perceived as privacy threats. Prior work has considered how various factors…
In this work we show that Tor is vulnerable to app deanonymization attacks on Android devices through network traffic analysis. For this purpose, we describe a general methodology for performing an attack that allows to deanonymize the apps…
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…
Dealing with the evolution of operating systems is challenging for developers of mobile apps, who have to deal with frequent upgrades that often include backward incompatible changes of the underlying API framework. As a consequence of…
This work proposes a novel approach to restricting the access for blacklisted Android system API calls. Main feature of the suggested method introduced in this paper is that it requires only rootless or (user-mode) access to the system…
Mobile applications increasingly rely on sensor data to infer user context and deliver personalized experiences. Yet the mechanisms behind this personalization remain opaque to users and researchers alike. This paper presents a sandbox…
Mobile payments have increased significantly in the recent years and one-to-one money transfers are offered by a wide variety of smartphone applications. These applications usually support scan-and-pay -- a technique that allows a payer to…
Many Android applications collect data from users. When they do, they must protect this collected data according to the current legal frameworks. Such data protection has become even more important since the European Union rolled out the…
We evaluate the power of simple networks side-channels to violate user privacy on Android devices. Specifically, we show that, using blackbox network metadata alone (i.e., traffic statistics such as transmission time and size of packets) it…
Android is a widely used operating system that employs a permission-based access control model. The Android Permissions System (APS) is responsible for mediating application resource requests. APS is a critical component of the Android…
As the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to evolve, smartphones have become essential components of IoT systems. However, with the increasing amount of personal information stored on smartphones, user privacy is at risk of being…
In today's mobile application marketplace, the ability of consumers to make informed choices regarding their privacy is extremely limited. Consumers largely rely on privacy policies and app permission mechanisms, but these do an inadequate…
Android-based smart devices are exponentially growing, and due to the ubiquity of the Internet, these devices are globally connected to the different devices/networks. Its popularity, attractive features, and mobility make malware creator…
Since Android has become a popular software platform for mobile devices recently; they offer almost the same functionality as personal computers. Malwares have also become a big concern. As the number of new Android applications tends to be…
The Google Play marketplace has introduced the Data Safety section to improve transparency regarding how mobile applications (apps) collect, share, and protect user data. This mechanism requires developers to disclose privacy and…
Mobile operating systems evolve quickly, frequently updating the APIs that app developers use to build their apps. Unfortunately, API updates do not always guarantee backward compatibility, causing apps to not longer work properly or even…