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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…
The proliferation of mobile applications and the subsequent sharing of personal data with service and application providers have given rise to substantial privacy concerns. Application marketplaces have introduced mechanisms to conform to…
Many phone vendors use Android as their underlying OS, but often extend it to add new functionality and to make it compatible with their specific phones. When a new version of Android is released, phone vendors need to merge or re-apply…
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…
Partial label learning (PLL) aims to solve the problem where each training instance is associated with a set of candidate labels, one of which is the correct label. Most PLL algorithms try to disambiguate the candidate label set, by either…
Privacy policies are the primary channel through which companies inform users about their data collection and sharing practices. These policies are often long and difficult to comprehend. Short notices based on information extracted from…
The widespread use of smartphones in daily life has raised concerns about privacy and security among researchers and practitioners. Privacy issues are generally highly prevalent in mobile applications, particularly targeting the Android…
Driven by the popularity of the Android system, Android app markets enjoy a booming prosperity in recent years. One critical problem for modern Android app markets is how to prevent apps that are going to receive low ratings from reaching…
The increasing frequency of attacks on Android applications coupled with the recent popularity of large language models (LLMs) necessitates a comprehensive understanding of the capabilities of the latter in identifying potential…
Good documentation offers the promise of enabling developers to easily understand design decisions. Unfortunately, in practice, design documents are often rarely updated, becoming inaccurate, incomplete, and untrustworthy. A better solution…
We present a design and an implementation of a security policy specification language based on metric linear-time temporal logic (MTL). MTL features temporal operators that are indexed by time intervals, allowing one to specify…
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…
The complex nature of intelligent systems motivates work on supporting users during interaction, for example through explanations. However, as of yet, there is little empirical evidence in regard to specific problems users face when…
Android and Facebook provide third-party applications with access to users' private data and the ability to perform potentially sensitive operations (e.g., post to a user's wall or place phone calls). As a security measure, these platforms…
App repackaging refers to the practice of customizing an existing mobile app and redistributing it in the wild to fool the final user into installing the repackaged app instead of the original one. In this way, an attacker can embed…
Android introduces a new permission model that allows apps to request permissions at runtime rather than at the installation time since 6.0 (Marshmallow, API level 23). While this runtime permission model provides users with greater…
There are over 1.2 million applications on the Google Play store today with a large number of competing applications for any given use or function. This creates challenges for users in selecting the right application. Moreover, some of the…
Policy enforcers are sophisticated runtime components that can prevent failures by enforcing the correct behavior of the software. While a single enforcer can be easily designed focusing only on the behavior of the application that must be…
Privacy policies are long, complex documents that end-users seldom read. Privacy labels aim to ameliorate these issues by providing succinct summaries of salient data practices. In December 2020, Apple began requiring that app developers…
Mobile apps often embed authentication secrets, such as API keys, tokens, and client IDs, to integrate with cloud services. However, developers often hardcode these credentials into Android apps, exposing them to extraction through reverse…