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Numerous tools rely on automatic categorization of Android apps as part of their methodology. However, incorrect categorization can lead to inaccurate outcomes, such as a malware detector wrongly flagging a benign app as malicious. One such…
Repackaging is a serious threat to the Android ecosystem as it deprives app developers of their benefits, contributes to spreading malware on users' devices, and increases the workload of market maintainers. In the space of six years, the…
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…
Android apps must be able to deal with both stop events, which require immediately stopping the execution of the app without losing state information, and start events, which require resuming the execution of the app at the same point it…
The amount of Android malware has increased greatly during the last few years. Static analysis is widely used in detecting such malware by analyzing the code without execution. The effectiveness of current tools relies on the app model as…
It is well known that antivirus engines are vulnerable to evasion techniques (e.g., obfuscation) that transform malware into its variants. However, it cannot be necessarily attributed to the effectiveness of these evasions, and the limits…
Explainability, i.e. the ability of a system to explain its behavior to users, has become an important quality of software-intensive systems. Recent work has focused on methods for generating explanations for various algorithmic paradigms…
With the continuous growth in the usage of Android apps, ensuring their security has become critically important. An increasing number of malicious apps adopt anti-analysis techniques to evade security measures. Although some research has…
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…
Contemporary mobile applications (apps) are designed to track, use, and share users' data, often without their consent, which results in potential privacy and transparency issues. To investigate whether mobile apps have always been…
Thousands of malicious applications targeting mobile devices, including the popular Android platform, are created every day. A large number of those applications are created by a small number of professional under-ground actors, however…
App quality has been shown to be the most important indicator of app adoption. To assure quality, developers mainly use testing to find bugs in app and apply structural and GUI test coverage criteria. However, mobile apps have more…
While there have been various studies towards Android apps and their development, there is limited discussion of the broader class of apps that fall in the fake area. Fake apps and their development are distinct from official apps and…
As mobile app usage continues to rise, so does the generation of extensive user interaction data, which includes actions such as swiping, zooming, or the time spent on a screen. Apps often collect a large amount of this data and claim to…
Increasing interest in securing the Android ecosystem has spawned numerous efforts to assist app developers in building secure apps. These efforts have resulted in tools and techniques capable of detecting vulnerabilities (and malicious…
Intense competition in the mobile apps market means it is important to maintain high levels of app reliability to avoid losing users. Yet despite its importance, app reliability is underexplored in the research literature. To address this…
App stores include an increasing amount of user feedback in form of app ratings and reviews. Research and recently also tool vendors have proposed analytics and data mining solutions to leverage this feedback to developers and analysts,…
Mobile applications are being used every day by more than half of the world's population to perform a great variety of tasks. With the increasingly widespread usage of these applications, the need arises for efficient techniques to test…
Mobile phones and tablets have become the most widely used computing devices, with a large predominance of the Android platform. As a natural evolution, the development of Android applications has surged and has become a major field of…
Millions of mobile apps have been available through various app markets. Although most app markets have enforced a number of automated or even manual mechanisms to vet each app before it is released to the market, thousands of low-quality…