Related papers: Should Users Trust Their Android Devices? A Scorin…
China is currently the country with the largest number of Android smartphone users. We use a combination of static and dynamic code analysis techniques to study the data transmitted by the preinstalled system apps on Android smartphones…
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…
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…
Access to privacy-sensitive information on Android is a growing concern in the mobile community. Albeit Google Play recently introduced some privacy guidelines, it is still an open problem to soundly verify whether apps actually comply with…
Wearable devices, or "wearables," bring great benefits but also potential risks that could expose users' activities with- out their awareness or consent. In this paper, we report findings from the first large-scale survey conducted to…
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…
Third-party Software Development Kits (SDKs) are widely adopted in Android app development, to effortlessly accelerate development pipelines and enhance app functionality. However, this convenience raises substantial concerns about…
Mobile apps are predominantly integrated with cloud services to benefit from enhanced functionalities. Adopting authentication using secrets such as API keys is crucial to ensure secure mobile-cloud interactions. However, developers often…
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…
Many Android applications collect data from users. The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires vendors to faithfully disclose which data their apps collect. This task is complicated because many apps use…
Third-party tracking allows companies to collect users' behavioural data and track their activity across digital devices. This can put deep insights into users' private lives into the hands of strangers, and often happens without users'…
Android utilizes a security mechanism that requires apps to request permission for accessing sensitive user data, e.g., contacts and SMSs, or certain system features, e.g., camera and Internet access. However, Android apps tend to be…
With the rapid development of online technologies and the widespread usage of mobile phones among children, it is crucial to protect their online safety. Some studies reported that online abuse and incidents negatively affect children's…
Privacy concerns have long been expressed around smart devices, and the concerns around Android apps have been studied by many past works. Over the past 10 years, we have crawled and scraped data for almost 1.9 million apps, and also stored…
User tracking is critical in the mobile ecosystem, which relies on device identifiers to build clear user profiles. In earlier ages, Android allowed easy access to non-resettable device identifiers like device serial numbers and IMEI by…
Current legal frameworks enforce that Android developers accurately report the data their apps collect. However, large codebases can make this reporting challenging. This paper employs an empirical approach to understand developers'…
The Android operating system runs on the majority of smartphones nowadays. Its success is driven by its availability to a variety of smartphone hardware vendors on the one hand, and the customization possibilities given to its users on the…
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,…
An average smartphone is equipped with an abundance of sensors to provide a variety of vital functionalities and conveniences. The data from these sensors can be collected in order to find trends or discover interesting correlations in the…
Never before has any OS been so popular as Android. Existing mobile phones are not simply devices for making phone calls and receiving SMS messages, but powerful communication and entertainment platforms for web surfing, social networking,…