Related papers: A Large-Scale Study on the Prevalence and Usage of…
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…
Confidential Virtual Machines (CVMs) provide isolation guarantees for data in use, but their threat model does not include physical level protection and side-channel attacks. Therefore, current deployments rely on trusted cloud providers to…
Deep learning has shown its power in many applications, including object detection in images, natural-language understanding, and speech recognition. To make it more accessible to end users, many deep learning models are now embedded in…
In recent years, the widespread informatization and rapid data explosion have increased the demand for high-performance heterogeneous systems that integrate multiple computing cores such as CPUs, Graphics Processing Units (GPUs),…
The widespread use of smartphones and tablets has made society heavily reliant on mobile applications (apps) for accessing various resources and services. These apps often handle sensitive personal, financial, and health data, making app…
To ensure secure and trustworthy execution of applications, vendors frequently embed trusted execution environments into their systems. Here, applications are protected from adversaries, including a malicious operating system. TEEs are…
Android devices are equipped with many pre-installed applications which have the capability of tracking and monitoring users. Although applications coming pre-installed pose a great danger to user security and privacy, they have received…
There are over 1.2 million applications on the Google Play store today with a large number of competing applications for any given use or function. This creates challenges for users in selecting the right application. Moreover, some of the…
Intense competition in the mobile apps market means it is important to maintain high levels of app reliability to avoid losing users. Yet despite its importance, app reliability is underexplored in the research literature. To address this…
The integration of AI techniques has become increasingly popular in software development, enhancing performance, usability, and the availability of intelligent features. With the rise of large language models (LLMs) and generative AI,…
Energy efficiency is an important criterion to judge the quality of mobile apps, but one third of our randomly sampled apps suffer from energy issues that can quickly drain battery power. To understand these issues, we conducted an…
Internet of Things (IoT) devices sit at the intersection of unwieldy software complexity and unprecedented attacker access. This unique position comes with a daunting security challenge: how can I protect both proprietary code and…
The transparency and privacy behavior of mobile browsers has remained widely unexplored by the research community. In fact, as opposed to regular Android apps, mobile browsers may present contradicting privacy behaviors. On the one end,…
Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) is a powerful cryptographic tool that allows fine-grained access control over data. Due to its features, ABE has been adopted in several applications, such as encrypted storage or access control systems.…
A common security architecture is based on the protection of certain resources by permission checks (used e.g., in Android and Blackberry). It has some limitations, for instance, when applications are granted more permissions than they…
The packaging model of Android apps requires the entire code necessary for the execution of an app to be shipped into one single apk file. Thus, an analysis of Android apps often visits code which is not part of the functionality delivered…
Decentralized smart contracts enable trustless collaboration but suffer from limited privacy and scalability, which hinders broader adoption. Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) based off-chain execution frameworks offer a promising…
The security of Android has been recently challenged by the discovery of a number of vulnerabilities involving different layers of the Android stack. We argue that such vulnerabilities are largely related to the interplay among layers…
Currently, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are becoming increasingly popular to facilitate data transfer in a variety of mobile applications. These APIs often process sensitive user information through their endpoints, which are…
This paper presents a measurement study of information leakage and SSL vulnerabilities in popular Android apps. We perform static and dynamic analysis on 100 apps, downloaded at least 10M times, that request full network access. Our…