Related papers: Mixed Signals: Analyzing Software Attribution Chal…
Due to the amount of data that smartphone applications can potentially access, platforms enforce permission systems that allow users to regulate how applications access protected resources. If users are asked to make security decisions too…
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,…
Android apps can hold secret strings of themselves such as cloud service credentials or encryption keys. Leakage of such secret strings can induce unprecedented consequences like monetary losses or leakage of user private information. In…
Expecting the shipment of 1 billion Android devices in 2017, cyber criminals have naturally extended their vicious activities towards Google's mobile operating system. With an estimated number of 700 new Android applications released every…
A common security architecture, called the permission-based security model (used e.g. in Android and Blackberry), entails intrinsic risks. For instance, applications can be granted more permissions than they actually need, what we call a…
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…
In today's mobile application marketplace, the ability of consumers to make informed choices regarding their privacy is extremely limited. Consumers largely rely on privacy policies and app permission mechanisms, but these do an inadequate…
Android devices are equipped with many pre-installed applications which have the capability of tracking and monitoring users. Although applications coming pre-installed pose a great danger to user security and privacy, they have received…
Mobile messaging apps are a fundamental communication infrastructure, used by billions of people every day to share information, including sensitive data. Security and Privacy are thus critical concerns for such applications. Although the…
While the literature on permissions from the end-user perspective is rich, there is a lack of empirical research on why developers request permissions, their conceptualization of permissions, and how their perspectives compare with…
Vendors in the Android ecosystem typically customize their devices by modifying Android Open Source Project (AOSP) code, adding in-house developed proprietary software, and pre-installing third-party applications. However, research has…
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…
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…
Mobile apps offer significant benefits, but their privacy protections often remain ineffective and confusing for users. While prior work mainly analyzes app privacy vulnerabilities, few approaches help users understand, set, and enforce…
Android applications collecting data from users must protect it according to the current legal frameworks. Such data protection has become even more important since the European Union rolled out the General Data Protection Regulation…
The rapid integration of AI-powered coding assistants into developer workflows has raised significant privacy and trust concerns. As developers entrust proprietary code to services like OpenAI's GPT, Google's Gemini, and GitHub Copilot, the…
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…
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…
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…
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…