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The security of Android has been recently challenged by the discovery of a number of vulnerabilities involving different layers of the Android stack. We argue that such vulnerabilities are largely related to the interplay among layers…
Android's permission system is designed to balance usability with informed consent, yet two legacy mechanisms still undermine that balance in Android 16: (i) permission groups that silently auto-grant new permissions within a group after a…
Vulnerabilities in Android smartphone chipsets have severe consequences, as recent real-world attacks have demonstrated that adversaries can leverage vulnerabilities to execute arbitrary code or exfiltrate confidential information. Despite…
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…
Android apps include third-party native libraries to increase performance and to reuse functionality. Native code is directly executed from apps through the Java Native Interface or the Android Native Development Kit. Android developers add…
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…
Studies over the past decade demonstrated that developers contributing to open source software systems tend to self-organize in "emerging" communities. This latent community structure has a significant impact on software quality. While…
Application markets provide a communication channel between app developers and their end-users in form of app reviews, which allow users to provide feedback about the apps. Although security and privacy in mobile apps are one of the biggest…
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…
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…
Android filesystem access control provides a foundation for Android system integrity. Android utilizes a combination of mandatory (e.g., SEAndroid) and discretionary (e.g., UNIX permissions) access control, both to protect the Android…
Despite being one of the largest and most popular projects, the official Android framework has only provided test cases for less than 30% of its APIs. Such a poor test case coverage rate has led to many compatibility issues that can cause…
Android Permission Model and Application (app) analysis has consistently remained the focus of the investigation of research groups and stakeholders of the Android ecosystem since it was launched in 2008. Even though the Android smartphone…
The integration of AI techniques has become increasingly popular in software development, enhancing performance, usability, and the availability of intelligent features. With the rise of large language models (LLMs) and generative AI,…
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…
In collaborative software development, program merging is the mechanism to integrate changes from multiple programmers. Merge algorithms in modern version control systems report a conflict when changes interfere textually. Merge conflicts…
This paper analyzes the phenomenon of software aging - namely, the gradual performance degradation and resource exhaustion in the long run - in the Android OS. The study intends to highlight if, and to what extent, devices from different…
Resource leak bugs in Android apps are pervasive and can cause serious performance degradation and system crashes. In recent years, several resource leak detection techniques have been proposed to assist Android developers in correctly…
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,…
Computing platforms such as smartphones frequently access Web content using many separate applications rather than a single Web browser application. These applications often deal with sensitive user information such as financial data or…