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Mobile apps offer significant benefits, but their privacy protections often remain ineffective and confusing for users. While prior work mainly analyzes app privacy vulnerabilities, few approaches help users understand, set, and enforce…
As a new format of mobile application, mini programs, which function within a larger app and are built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript web technology, have become the way to do almost everything in China. This paper presents our research on…
This paper presents a large-scale analysis of fingerprinting-like behavior in the mobile application ecosystem. We take a market-based approach, focusing on third-party tracking as enabled by applications' common use of third-party SDKs.…
The number of smartphones, tablets, sensors, and connected wearable devices are rapidly increasing. Today, in many parts of the globe, the penetration of mobile computers has overtaken the number of traditional personal computers. This…
We present an analysis of 12 million instances of privacy-relevant reviews publicly visible on the Google Play Store that span a 10 year period. By leveraging state of the art NLP techniques, we examine what users have been writing about…
As mobile app usage continues to rise, so does the generation of extensive user interaction data, which includes actions such as swiping, zooming, or the time spent on a screen. Apps often collect a large amount of this data and claim to…
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…
Popular instant messaging applications such as WhatsApp and Signal provide end-to-end encryption for billions of users. They rely on a centralized, application-specific server to distribute public keys and relay encrypted messages between…
Mini-applications, commonly referred to as mini-apps, are compact software programs embedded within larger applications or platforms, offering targeted functionality without the need for separate installations. Typically web-based or…
In the age of ubiquitous technologies, security- and privacy-focused choices have turned out to be a significant concern for individuals and organizations. Risks of such pervasive technologies are extensive and often misaligned with user…
Mobile devices encroach on almost every part of our lives, including work and leisure, and contain a wealth of personal and sensitive information. It is, therefore, imperative that these devices uphold high security standards. A key aspect…
Smartphone motion sensors provide a concealed mechanism for eavesdropping on acoustic information, like touchtones, emitted by a device. Eavesdropping on touchtones exposes credit card information, banking pins, and social security card…
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…
SMS Phishing (also known as 'smishing') is a growing deceptive social engineering (SE) attack that leverages mobile SMS to conduct cybercrimes such as stealing sensitive information or spreading malware by tricking users into interacting…
Privacy, security, and accessibility, like ethical concerns in mobile applications (a.k.a. apps), commonly subsumed under non-functional requirements, are generally reported by users through app reviews available in app stores. However,…
FemTech, a rising trend in mobile apps, empowers women to digitally manage their health and family planning. However, privacy and security vulnerabilities in period-tracking and fertility-monitoring apps present significant risks, such as…
On-device machine learning (ML) is quickly gaining popularity among mobile apps. It allows offline model inference while preserving user privacy. However, ML models, considered as core intellectual properties of model owners, are now stored…
Mobile apps exploit embedded sensors and wireless connectivity of a device to empower users with portable computations, context-aware communication, and enhanced interaction. Specifically, mobile health apps (mHealth apps for short) are…
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,…
Mobile applications, mobile apps for short, have proven their usefulness in enhancing service provisioning across a multitude of domains that range from smart healthcare, to mobile commerce, and areas of context sensitive computing. In…