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Modern software development relies heavily on Application Programming Interface (API) libraries. However, there are often certain constraints on using API elements in such libraries. Failing to follow such constraints (API misuse) could…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-08-20 Tam The Nguyen , Phong Minh Vu , Tung Thanh Nguyen

Objective. Insecure Direct Object Reference (IDOR) or Broken Object Level Authorization (BOLA) are one of the critical type of access control vulnerabilities for modern applications. As a result, an attacker can bypass authorization checks…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-01-27 Alexander Barabanov , Denis Dergunov , Denis Makrushin , Aleksey Teplov

Mobile applications, particularly those from social media platforms such as WeChat and TikTok, are evolving into "super apps" that offer a wide range of services such as instant messaging and media sharing, e-commerce, e-learning, and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-06-16 Chao Wang , Yue Zhang , Zhiqiang Lin

Application Programming Interface (API) incompatibility is a long-standing issue in Android application development. The rapid evolution of Android APIs results in a significant number of API additions, removals, and changes between…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-06-27 Shidong Pan , Tianchen Guo , Lihong Zhang , Pei Liu , Zhenchang Xing , Xiaoyu Sun

Mobile apps provide various critical services, such as banking, communication, and healthcare. To this end, they have access to our personal information and have the ability to perform actions on our behalf. Hence, securing mobile apps is…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Joydeep Mitra , Venkatesh-Prasad Ranganath , Torben Amtoft , Mike Higgins

Mobile applications (apps) have become an essential part of everyday life, offering convenient access to services such as banking, healthcare, and shopping. With these apps handling sensitive personal and financial data, ensuring their…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Anthony Peruma , Timothy Huo , Ana Catarina Araújo , Jake Imanaka , Rick Kazman

The Java libraries JCA and JSSE offer cryptographic APIs to facilitate secure coding. When developers misuse some of the APIs, their code becomes vulnerable to cyber-attacks. To eliminate such vulnerabilities, people built tools to detect…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-05-02 Ying Zhang , Ya Xiao , Md Mahir Asef Kabir , Danfeng , Yao , Na Meng

Mobile phones have developed into complex platforms with large numbers of installed applications and a wide range of sensitive data. Application security policies limit the permissions of each installed application. As applications may…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2012-05-01 Steffen Bartsch , Karsten Sohr , Michaela Bunke , Oliver Hofrichter , Bernhard Berger

Mobile applications rely on complex backends that introduce significant security risks, yet developers often lack the tools to assess these risks effectively. This paper presents AndroScanner, an automated pipeline for detecting…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Harini Dandu

This report summarizes our findings regarding a severe weakness in implementations of the Open Mobile API deployed on several Android devices. The vulnerability allows arbitrary code coming from a specially crafted Android application…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2016-01-25 Michael Roland

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-02-25 Oliviero Riganelli , Ionut Daniel Fagadau , Daniela Micucci , Leonardo Mariani

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-01-19 Xiaoyu Sun , Xiao Chen , Kui Liu , Sheng Wen , Li Li , John Grundy

Android is the most used Operating System worldwide for mobile devices, with hundreds of thousands of apps downloaded daily. Although these apps are primarily written in Java and Kotlin, advanced functionalities such as graphics or…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Silvia Lucia Sanna , Diego Soi , Davide Maiorca , Giorgio Fumera , Giorgio Giacinto

Mobile devices are used more and more in everyday life. They are our cameras, wallets, and keys. Basically, they embed most of our private information in our pocket. For this and other reasons, mobile devices, and in particular the software…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2017-04-13 Mario Linares-Vasquez , Gabriele Bavota , Camilo Escobar-Velasquez

Several studies showed that misuses of cryptographic APIs are common in real-world code (e.g., Apache projects and Android apps). There exist several open-sourced and commercial security tools that automatically screen Java programs to…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-12-09 Sharmin Afrose , Ya Xiao , Sazzadur Rahaman , Barton P. Miller , Danfeng , Yao

Mobile applications (apps) have become deeply personal, constantly demanding access to privacy-sensitive information in exchange for more personalized user experiences. Such privacy-invading practices have generated major multidimensional…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-10-10 Fahimeh Ebrahimi , Miroslav Tushev , Anas Mahmoud

Broken Access Control (BAC) violations, which consistently rank among the top five security risks in the OWASP API Security Top 10, refer to unauthorized access attempts arising from BAC vulnerabilities, whose successful exploitation can…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Yanjing Yang , He Zhang , Bohan Liu , Jinwei Xu , Jinghao Hu , Liming Dong , Zhewen Mao , Dongxue Pan

Due to the frequent encountering of web URLs in various application scenarios (e.g., chatting and email reading), many mobile apps build their in-app browsing interfaces (IABIs) to provide a seamless user experience. Although this achieves…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-09-07 Zicheng Zhang , Daoyuan Wu , Lixiang Li , Debin Gao

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,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2014-04-30 Li Li , Alexandre Bartel , Jacques Klein , Yves Le Traon , Steven Arzt , Siegfried Rasthofer , Eric Bodden , Damien Octeau , Patrick McDaniel

To identify security vulnerabilities in Android applications, numerous static application security testing (SAST) tools have been proposed. However, it poses significant challenges to assess their overall performance on diverse…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Jingyun Zhu , Kaixuan Li , Sen Chen , Lingling Fan , Junjie Wang , Xiaofei Xie