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The Android ecosystem is vulnerable to issues such as app repackaging, counterfeiting, and piracy, threatening both developers and users. To mitigate these risks, developers often employ code obfuscation techniques. However, while effective…
The ubiquity of smartphones, and their very broad capabilities and usage, make the security of these devices tremendously important. Unfortunately, despite all progress in security and privacy mechanisms, vulnerabilities continue to…
As data privacy continues to be a crucial human-right concern as recognized by the UN, regulatory agencies have demanded developers obtain user permission before accessing user-sensitive data. Mainly through the use of privacy policies…
Although there are over 1,600,000 third-party Android apps in the Google Play Store, little has been conclusively shown about how their individual (and collective) permission usage has evolved over time. Recently, Android 6 overhauled the…
Mobile app distribution platforms such as Google Play Store allow users to share their feedback about downloaded apps in the form of a review comment and a corresponding star rating. Typically, the star rating ranges from one to five stars,…
This paper presents a large-scale analysis of fingerprinting-like behavior in the mobile application ecosystem. We take a market-based approach, focusing on third-party tracking as enabled by applications' common use of third-party SDKs.…
The recent evolution on the smart phone technology has made its application market huge and less secure. Every single day large number of apps introduced in the android market (mostly on google play store) without any particular inspections…
Authorship attribution (i.e., determining who is the author of a piece of source code) is an established research topic. State-of-the-art results for the authorship attribution problem look promising for the software engineering field,…
The Android ecosystem faces a notable challenge known as fragmentation, which denotes the extensive diversity within the system. This issue is mainly related to differences in system versions, device hardware specifications, and…
Identity-based code signing enables software developers to digitally sign their code using cryptographic keys. This key is then linked to an identity (e.g., through an identity provider), allowing signers to verify both the code's origin…
Android apps require permissions when accessing resources related to privacy or system integrity. Starting from Android 6, these permissions have to be asked at runtime. However, migrating to the new permission model poses multiple…
Due to the convenience of access-on-demand to information and business solutions, mobile apps have become an important asset in the digital world. In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, app developers have joined the response effort in…
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…
In the digitized world, smartphones and their apps play an important role. To name just a few examples, some apps offer possibilities for entertainment, others for online banking, and others offer support for two-factor authentication.…
The privacy of personal information has received significant attention in mobile software. Although previous researchers have designed some methods to identify the conflict between app behavior and privacy policies, little is known about…
There are over one million apps on Google Play Store and over half a million publishers. Having such a huge number of apps and developers can pose a challenge to app users and new publishers on the store. Discovering apps can be challenging…
With the rapid growth of mobile apps, users' concerns about their privacy have become increasingly prominent. Android app logs serve as crucial computer resources, aiding developers in debugging and monitoring the status of Android apps,…
This paper reports a large-scale study that aims to understand how mobile application (app) vulnerabilities are associated with software libraries. We analyze both free and paid apps. Studying paid apps was quite meaningful because it…
With over 500,000 commits and more than 700 contributors, the Android platform is undoubtedly one of the largest industrial-scale software projects. This project provides the Android API, and developers heavily rely on this API to develop…
In recent years, researchers have developed a number of tools to conduct taint analysis of Android applications. While all the respective papers aim at providing a thorough empirical evaluation, comparability is hindered by varying or…