Related papers: Same App, Different Behaviors: Uncovering Device-s…
User tracking is critical in the mobile ecosystem, which relies on device identifiers to build clear user profiles. In earlier ages, Android allowed easy access to non-resettable device identifiers like device serial numbers and IMEI by…
Mobile gaming applications (apps) have become increasingly pervasive, including a growing number of games designed for children. Despite their popularity, these apps often integrate complex analytics, advertising, and attribution…
Mobile apps are predominantly integrated with cloud services to benefit from enhanced functionalities. Adopting authentication using secrets such as API keys is crucial to ensure secure mobile-cloud interactions. However, developers often…
XML configuration files are widely used in Android to define an app's user interface and essential runtime information such as system permissions. As Android evolves, it might introduce functional changes in the configuration environment,…
Large-scale collection of human behavioral data by companies raises serious privacy concerns. We show that behavior captured in the form of application usage data collected from smartphones is highly unique even in very large datasets…
Several solutions ensuring the dynamic detection of malicious activities on Android ecosystem have been proposed. These are represented by generic rules and models that identify any purported malicious behavior. However, the approaches…
With millions of apps that can be downloaded from official or third-party market, Android has become one of the most popular mobile platforms today. These apps help people in all kinds of ways and thus have access to lots of user's data…
As mobile applications (apps) become ubiquitous in everyday life, it is crucial for developers to prioritize accessibility for users with diverse abilities. While previous research has identified widespread accessibility issues and raised…
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…
Android's permission system is designed to balance usability with informed consent, yet two legacy mechanisms still undermine that balance in Android 16: (i) permission groups that silently auto-grant new permissions within a group after a…
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…
Third party tracking allows companies to identify users and track their behaviour across multiple digital services. This paper presents an empirical study of the prevalence of third-party trackers on 959,000 apps from the US and UK Google…
While many studies have looked at privacy properties of the Android and Google Play app ecosystem, comparatively much less is known about iOS and the Apple App Store, the most widely used ecosystem in the US. At the same time, there is…
Android has been the most popular smartphone system, with multiple platform versions (e.g., KITKAT and Lollipop) active in the market. To manage the application's compatibility with one or more platform versions, Android allows apps to…
In recent years, there has been rapid growth in mobile devices such as smartphones, and a number of applications are developed specifically for the smartphone market. In particular, there are many applications that are ``free'' to the user,…
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…
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 competing nature of the app market motivates us to shift our focus on apps that provide similar functionalities and directly compete with each other (i.e., peer apps). In this work, we study the ratings and the review text of 100…
Android is the most popular operating system with billions of active devices. Unfortunately, its popularity and openness makes it attractive for unwanted apps, i.e., malware and potentially unwanted programs (PUP). In Android, app…
Fairness is one of the socio-technical concerns that must be addressed in software systems. Considering the popularity of mobile software applications (apps) among a wide range of individuals worldwide, mobile apps with unfair behaviors and…