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With over 500,000 commits and more than 700 contributors, the Android platform is undoubtedly one of the largest industrial-scale software projects. This project provides the Android API, and developers heavily rely on this API to develop…
Android apps collecting data from users must comply with legal frameworks to ensure data protection. This requirement has become even more important since the implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by the European…
Security of Android devices is now paramount, given their wide adoption among consumers. As researchers develop tools for statically or dynamically detecting suspicious apps, malware writers regularly update their attack mechanisms to hide…
Failure data collected from the field (e.g., failure traces, bug reports, and memory dumps) represent an invaluable source of information for developers who need to reproduce and analyze failures. Unfortunately, field data may include…
Fragmentation is a serious problem in the Android ecosystem. This problem is mainly caused by the fast evolution of the system itself and the various customizations independently maintained by different smartphone manufacturers. Many…
Like many desktop operating systems in the 1990s, Android is now in the process of including support for multi-user scenarios. Because these scenarios introduce new threats to the system, we should have an understanding of how well the…
Third-party tracking, the collection and sharing of behavioural data about individuals, is a significant and ubiquitous privacy threat in mobile apps. The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was introduced in 2018 to protect…
Context: Post-release user feedback plays an integral role in improving software quality and informing new features. Given its growing importance, feedback concerning security enhancements is particularly noteworthy. In considering the…
Over the past decade, AR/VR devices have drastically changed how we interact with the digital world. Users often share sensitive information, such as their location, browsing history, and even financial data, within third-party apps…
Android's Private Compute Core (PCC) is a secure, isolated environment within the operating system, that maintains separation from apps while enabling users and developers to maintain control over their data. It is backed by open-source…
Tracking is a highly privacy-invasive data collection practice that has been ubiquitous in mobile apps for many years due to its role in supporting advertising-based revenue models. In response, Apple introduced two significant changes with…
In the absence of pedestrian crossing lights, finding a safe moment to cross the road is often hazardous and challenging, especially for people with visual impairments. We present a reliable low-cost solution, an Android device attached to…
The rapid development of video surveillance systems for object detection, tracking, activity recognition, and anomaly detection has revolutionized our day-to-day lives while setting alarms for privacy concerns. It isn't easy to strike a…
In the first quarter of 2011, Android has become the top-selling operating system for smartphones. In this paper, we present a novel, highly critical attack that allows unprompted installation of arbitrary applications from the Android…
We present an add-on for the Android platform, capable of intercepting nearly all interactions between apps or apps with the platform, including arguments of method invocations in a human-readable format. A preliminary performance…
Due to the amount of data that smartphone applications can potentially access, platforms enforce permission systems that allow users to regulate how applications access protected resources. If users are asked to make security decisions too…
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…
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…
DNS over TLS (DoT) and DNS over HTTPS (DoH) promise to improve privacy and security of DNS by encrypting DNS messages, especially when messages are padded to a uniform size. Firstly, to demonstrate the limitations of recommended padding…
Android users are now suffering severe threats from unwanted behaviors of various apps. The analysis of apps' audit logs is one of the essential methods for some device manufacturers to unveil the underlying malice within apps. We propose…