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Developers are increasingly integrating Language Models (LMs) into their mobile apps to provide features such as chat-based assistants. To prevent LM misuse, they impose various restrictions, including limits on the number of queries, input…
Perceptions of police trustworthiness are linked to citizens' willingness to cooperate with police. Trust can be fostered by introducing accountability mechanisms, or by increasing a shared police/citizen identity, both which can be…
LLM app (tool) ecosystems are rapidly evolving to support sophisticated use cases that often require extensive user data collection. Given that LLM apps are developed by third parties and anecdotal evidence indicating inconsistent…
Android employs a permission framework that empowers users to either accept or deny sharing their private data (for example, location) with an app. However, many apps tend to crash when they are denied permission, leaving users no choice…
Sensors (e.g., light, gyroscope, accelerometer) and sensing-enabled applications on a smart device make the applications more user-friendly and efficient. However, the current permission-based sensor management systems of smart devices only…
Web services commonly employ Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) for performance and security. As web traffic is becoming 100% HTTPS, more and more websites allow CDNs to terminate their HTTPS connections. This practice may expose a…
In the last 10 years, cache attacks on Intel x86 CPUs have gained increasing attention among the scientific community and powerful techniques to exploit cache side channels have been developed. However, modern smartphones use one or more…
The popularity of smart-home assistant systems such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home leads to a booming third-party application market (over 70,000 applications across the two stores). While existing works have revealed security issues in…
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…
Android applications collecting data from users must protect it according to the current legal frameworks. Such data protection has become even more important since in 2018 the European Union rolled out the General Data Protection…
Operating Systems enforce logical isolation using abstractions such as processes, containers, and isolation technologies to protect a system from malicious or buggy code. In this paper, we show new types of side channels through the file…
Online advertisers and analytics services (or trackers), are constantly tracking users activities as they access web services either through browsers or a mobile apps. Numerous tools such as browser plugins and specialized mobile apps have…
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…
Bystander privacy in smart homes has been widely studied in Western contexts, yet it remains underexplored in non-Western countries such as China. In this study, we analyze 49 Chinese smart home apps using a mixed-methods approach,…
Despite its widespread use in Android apps, reflection poses graving problems for static security analysis. Currently, string inference is applied to handle reflection, resulting in significantly missed security vulnerabilities. In this…
Many smartphone apps transmit personally identifiable information (PII), often without the users knowledge. To address this issue, we present PrivacyProxy, a system that monitors outbound network traffic and generates app-specific…
Billions of secure messaging users have adopted end-to-end encryption (E2EE). Nevertheless, challenges remain. Most communication applications do not provide E2EE, and application silos prevent interoperability. Our qualitative analysis of…
Instant messaging services are quickly becoming the most dominant form of communication among consumers around the world. Apple iMessage, for example, handles over 2 billion message each day, while WhatsApp claims 16 billion messages from…
Nowadays privacy in the connected world is a big user's concern. The ubiquity of mobile devices permits billions of users browse the web at anytime, anywhere. Near Field Communication (NFC) appeared as a seamlessly and simply communication…
Android is the most popular operating system with billions of active devices. Unfortunately, its popularity and openness makes it attractive for unwanted apps, i.e., malware and potentially unwanted programs (PUP). In Android, app…