Related papers: A Large-Scale Study on the Prevalence and Usage of…
End-to-end encryption (E2EE) has become the gold standard for securing communications, bringing strong confidentiality and privacy guarantees to billions of users worldwide. However, the current push towards widespread integration of…
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…
Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) provide hardware-enforced isolation that protects sensitive code and data from untrusted software. Despite their strong security guarantees, analyzing TEE applications remains challenging due to the…
Accurate detection of third-party libraries (TPLs) is fundamental to Android security, supporting vulnerability tracking, malware detection, and supply chain auditing. Despite many proposed tools, their real-world effectiveness remains…
The ubiquity of mobile applications has increased dramatically in recent years, opening up new opportunities for cyber attackers and heightening security concerns in the mobile ecosystem. As a result, researchers and practitioners have…
The open-source nature of the Android OS makes it possible for manufacturers to ship custom versions of the OS along with a set of pre-installed apps, often for product differentiation. Some device vendors have recently come under scrutiny…
While there have been various studies towards Android apps and their development, there is limited discussion of the broader class of apps that fall in the fake area. Fake apps and their development are distinct from official apps and…
Mobile devices have access to personal, potentially sensitive data, and there is a large number of mobile applications and third-party libraries that transmit this information over the network to remote servers (including app developer…
Android allows apps to communicate with its system services via system service helpers so that these apps can use various functions provided by the system services. Meanwhile, the system services rely on their service helpers to enforce…
Emerging crypto economies still hemorrhage digital assets because legacy wallets leak private keys at almost every layer of the software stack, from user-space libraries to kernel memory dumps. This paper solves that twin crisis of security…
Many Android applications embed webpages via WebView components and execute JavaScript code within Android. Hybrid applications leverage dedicated APIs to load a resource and render it in a WebView. Furthermore, Android objects can be…
File-based encryption (FBE) schemes have been developed by software vendors to address security concerns related to data storage. While methods of encrypting data-at-rest may seem relatively straightforward, the main proponents of these…
Security of mobile apps affects the security of their users. This has fueled the development of techniques to automatically detect vulnerabilities in mobile apps and help developers secure their apps; specifically, in the context of Android…
In this paper, we report our recent practice at Tencent for user modeling based on mobile app usage. User behaviors on mobile app usage, including retention, installation, and uninstallation, can be a good indicator for both long-term and…
New types of Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) architectures like TrustLite and Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) are emerging. They bring new features that can lead to innovative security and privacy solutions. But each new TEE…
Unauthorized data alteration has been a longstanding threat since the emergence of malware. System and application software can be reinstalled and hardware can be replaced, but user data is priceless in many cases. Especially in recent…
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…
The Google Play marketplace has introduced the Data Safety section to improve transparency regarding how mobile applications (apps) collect, share, and protect user data. This mechanism requires developers to disclose privacy and…
Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) have become a cornerstone of confidential computing, attracting significant attention from academia and industry. To support secure and scalable application deployment on confidential clouds, TEE…
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…