Related papers: Our fingerprints don't fade from the Apps we touch…
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…
Browsers and their users can be tracked even in the absence of a persistent IP address or cookie. Unique and hence identifying pieces of information, making up what is known as a fingerprint, can be collected from browsers by a visited…
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…
The apps installed on a smartphone can reveal much information about a user, such as their medical conditions, sexual orientation, or religious beliefs. Additionally, the presence or absence of particular apps on a smartphone can inform an…
Browser fingerprinting is a growing technique for identifying and tracking users online without traditional methods like cookies. This paper gives an overview by examining the various fingerprinting techniques and analyzes the entropy and…
Modern Web APIs allow developers to provide extensively customized experiences for website visitors, but the richness of the device information they provide also make them vulnerable to being abused to construct browser fingerprints,…
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…
Securing browsers in mobile devices is very challenging, because these browser apps usually provide browsing services to other apps in the same device. A malicious app installed in a device can potentially obtain sensitive information…
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,…
Advertisers are increasingly turning to fingerprinting techniques to track users across the web. As web browsing activity shifts to mobile platforms, traditional browser fingerprinting techniques become less effective; however, device…
Browser fingerprinting can be used to identify and track users across the Web, even without cookies, by collecting attributes from users' devices to create unique "fingerprints". This technique and resulting privacy risks have been studied…
Mobile applications (hereafter, apps) collect a plethora of information regarding the user behavior and his device through third-party analytics libraries. However, the collection and usage of such data raised several privacy concerns,…
The rise of mobile apps has brought greater convenience and many options for users. However, many apps use analytics services to collect a wide range of user interaction data, with privacy policies often failing to reveal the types of…
As privacy features in Android operating system improve, privacy-invasive apps may gradually shift their focus to non-standard and covert channels for leaking private user/device information. Such leaks also remain largely undetected by…
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…
People are becoming increasingly concerned with their online privacy, especially with how advertising companies track them across websites (a practice called cross-site tracking), as reconstructing a user's browser history can reveal…
Browser fingerprinting is a pervasive online tracking technique used increasingly often for profiling and targeted advertising. Prior research on the prevalence of fingerprinting heavily relied on automated web crawls, which inherently…
Modern browsers give access to several attributes that can be collected to form a browser fingerprint. Although browser fingerprints have primarily been studied as a web tracking tool, they can contribute to improve the current state of web…
Browser fingerprinting is a relatively new method of uniquely identifying browsers that can be used to track web users. In some ways it is more privacy-threatening than tracking via cookies, as users have no direct control over it. A number…
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…