Related papers: Uncovering and Exploiting Hidden APIs in Mobile Su…
China is currently the country with the largest number of Android smartphone users. We use a combination of static and dynamic code analysis techniques to study the data transmitted by the preinstalled system apps on Android smartphones…
The Android framework provides a rich set of APIs that can be exploited by developers to build their apps. However, the rapid evolution of these APIs jointly with the specific characteristics of the lifecycle of the Android components…
Network latency in mobile software has a large impact on user experience, with potentially severe economic consequences. Prefetching and caching have been shown effective in reducing the latencies in browser-based systems. However, those…
Mobile developers face unique challenges when detecting and reporting crashes in apps due to their prevailing GUI event-driven nature and additional sources of inputs (e.g., sensor readings). To support developers in these tasks, we…
Digital lending applications, commonly referred to as loan apps, have become a primary channel for microcredit in emerging markets. However, many of these apps demand excessive permissions and misuse sensitive user data for coercive…
Unlike the Web where each web page has a global URL to reach, a specific "content page" inside a mobile app cannot be opened unless the user explores the app with several operations from the landing page. Recently, deep links have been…
Nowadays many people store photos in smartphones. Many of the photos contain sensitive, private information, such as a photocopy of driver's license and credit card. An arising privacy concern is with the unauthorized accesses to such…
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…
Contact tracing has historically been used to retard the spread of infectious diseases, but if it is exercised by hand in large-scale, it is known to be a resource-intensive and quite deficient process. Nowadays, digital contact tracing has…
A number of Internet of Things (IoTs) platforms have emerged to enable various IoT apps developed by third-party developers to automate smart homes. Prior research mostly concerns the overprivilege problem in the permission model. Our work,…
Voice applications (voice apps) are a key element in Voice Assistant ecosystems such as Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, as they provide assistants with a wide range of capabilities that users can invoke with a voice command. Most voice…
Most contemporary mobile devices offer hardware-backed storage for cryptographic keys, user data, and other sensitive credentials. Such hardware protects credentials from extraction by an adversary who has compromised the main operating…
User reviews published in mobile app repositories are essential for understanding user satisfaction and engagement within a specific market segment. Manual analysis of reviews is impractical due to the large data volume, and automated…
A Webview embeds a full-fledged browser in a mobile application and allows the application to expose a custom interface to JavaScript code. This is a popular technique to build so-called hybrid applications, but it circumvents the usual…
We are in the dawn of deep learning explosion for smartphones. To bridge the gap between research and practice, we present the first empirical study on 16,500 the most popular Android apps, demystifying how smartphone apps exploit deep…
The ability to identify the author responsible for a given software object is critical for many research studies and for enhancing software transparency and accountability. However, as opposed to other application markets like iOS,…
Android applications may leak privacy data carelessly or maliciously. In this work we perform inter-component data-flow analysis to detect privacy leaks between components of Android applications. Unlike all current approaches, our tool,…
String obfuscation is an established technique used by proprietary, closed-source applications to protect intellectual property. Furthermore, it is also frequently used to hide spyware or malware in applications. In both cases, the…
The Android operating system is currently the most popular mobile operating system in the world. Android is based on Linux and therefore inherits its features including its Inter-Process Communication (IPC) mechanisms. These mechanisms are…
An increasing number of mental health services are offered through mobile systems, a paradigm called mHealth. Although there is an unprecedented growth in the adoption of mHealth systems, partly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, concerns about…