Related papers: Uncovering and Exploiting Hidden APIs in Mobile Su…
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…
Security of Android devices is now paramount, given their wide adoption among consumers. As researchers develop tools for statically or dynamically detecting suspicious apps, malware writers regularly update their attack mechanisms to hide…
The scheme of application (app) distribution systems involving incentivized third-party app vendors is a desirable option for the emerging edge computing systems. However, such a scheme also brings various security challenges as faced by…
Smartphone apps usually have access to sensitive user data such as contacts, geo-location, and account credentials and they might share such data to external entities through the Internet or with other apps. Confidentiality of user data…
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…
Recent industrial and academic research has focused on data-driven analytics with smartphones by collecting user interaction, context, and device systems data through Application Programming interfaces (APIs) and sensors. The Android OS…
While extremely valuable to achieve advanced functions, mobile phone sensors can be abused by attackers to implement malicious activities in Android apps, as experimentally demonstrated by many state-of-the-art studies. There is hence a…
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…
With smartphone technologies enhanced way of interacting with the world around us, it has also been paving the way for easier access to our private and personal information. This has been amplified by the existence of numerous embedded…
As social networking takes to the mobile world, smartphone apps provide users with ever-changing ways to interact with each other. Over the past couple of years, an increasing number of apps have entered the market offering end-to-end…
Inter-Component Communication (ICC) is a key mechanism in Android. It enables developers to compose rich functionalities and explore reuse within and across apps. Unfortunately, as reported by a large body of literature, ICC is rather…
The Android platform introduces the runtime permission model in version 6.0. The new model greatly improves data privacy and user experience, but brings new challenges for app developers. First, it allows users to freely revoke granted…
Smartphone technology has drastically improved over the past decade. These improvements have seen the creation of specialized health applications, which offer consumers a range of health-related activities such as tracking and checking…
On modern operating systems, applications under the same user are separated from each other, for the purpose of protecting them against malware and compromised programs. Given the complexity of today's OSes, less clear is whether such…
Online social networks support a vibrant ecosystem of third-party apps that get access to personal information of a large number of users. Despite several recent high-profile incidents, methods to systematically detect data misuse by…
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…
Android has been the most popular smartphone system with multiple platform versions active in the market. To manage the application's compatibility with one or more platform versions, Android allows apps to declare the supported platform…
Mobile apps frequently use Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and WiFi scanning permissions to discover nearby devices like peripherals and connect to WiFi Access Points (APs). However, wireless interfaces also serve as a covert proxy for…
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,…
The proper use of Android app permissions is crucial to the success and security of these apps. Users must agree to permission requests when installing or running their apps. Despite official Android platform documentation on proper…