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Human values such as honesty, social responsibility, fairness, privacy, and the like are things considered important by individuals and society. Software systems, including mobile software applications (apps), may ignore or violate such…

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,…

Nowadays, privacy has become a very serious issue with smart and mobile platforms. Users tend to allow intrusive apps access much sensible information without really knowing the potential threats. To solve this issue several solutions (e.g.…

The Android ecosystem is vulnerable to issues such as app repackaging, counterfeiting, and piracy, threatening both developers and users. To mitigate these risks, developers often employ code obfuscation techniques. However, while effective…

Many Android applications embed webpages via WebView components and execute JavaScript code within Android. Hybrid applications leverage dedicated APIs to load a resource and render it in a WebView. Furthermore, Android objects can be…

The major mobile platforms, Android and iOS, have introduced changes that restrict user tracking to improve user privacy, yet apps continue to covertly track users via device fingerprinting. We study the opportunity to improve this dynamic…

Internet of Things is growing rapidly, with many connected devices now available to consumers. With this growth, the IoT apps that manage the devices from smartphones raise significant security concerns. Typically, these apps are secured…

With the digital breakthrough, smart phones have become very essential component. Mobile devices are very attractive attack surface for cyber thieves as they hold personal details (accounts, locations, contacts, photos) and have potential…

Most contemporary mobile devices offer hardware-backed storage for cryptographic keys, user data, and other sensitive credentials. Such hardware protects credentials from extraction by an adversary who has compromised the main operating…

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…

People usually seek out varied information to deal with their health problems. However, the large volume of information available may present challenges for the public to distinguish good from suboptimal advice. How to ensure the right…

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…

There are over one million apps on Google Play Store and over half a million publishers. Having such a huge number of apps and developers can pose a challenge to app users and new publishers on the store. Discovering apps can be challenging…

The industry for children's apps is thriving at the cost of children's privacy: these apps routinely disclose children's data to multiple data trackers and ad networks. As children spend increasing time online, such exposure accumulates to…

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 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…

Market and user characteristics of mobile apps make their release management different from proprietary software products and web services. Despite the wealth of information regarding users' feedback on an app, an in-depth analysis of app…

In the Google Play store, an introduction page is associated with every mobile application (app) for users to acquire its details, including screenshots, description, reviews, etc. However, it remains a challenge to identify what items…

Prior works have shown that the list of apps installed by a user reveal a lot about user interests and behavior. These works rely on the semantics of the installed apps and show that various user traits could be learnt automatically using…

Within the thriving mobile app ecosystem ecosystem, a subset of apps provides illicit services such as gambling and pornography to pursue economic gains, collectively referred to as "underground economy apps". While previous studies have…