Related papers: How Far are App Secrets from Being Stolen? A Case …
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…
With the rapid growth of mobile apps, users' concerns about their privacy have become increasingly prominent. Android app logs serve as crucial computer resources, aiding developers in debugging and monitoring the status of Android apps,…
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…
Privacy concerns have long been expressed around smart devices, and the concerns around Android apps have been studied by many past works. Over the past 10 years, we have crawled and scraped data for almost 1.9 million apps, and also stored…
Third-party security apps are an integral part of the Android app ecosystem. Many users install them as an extra layer of protection for their devices. There are hundreds of such security apps, both free and paid in Google Play Store and…
Contemporary mobile applications (apps) are designed to track, use, and share users' data, often without their consent, which results in potential privacy and transparency issues. To investigate whether mobile apps have always been…
Privacy policies are intended to inform users about how software systems collect and handle data, yet they often remain vague or incomplete. This paper presents an empirical study of patterns in log-related statements within privacy…
[Background] Web communication is universal in cyberspace, and security risks in this domain are devastating. [Aims] We analyzed the prevalence of six security smells in mobile app servers, and we investigated the consequence of these…
The ubiquity of smartphones, and their very broad capabilities and usage, make the security of these devices tremendously important. Unfortunately, despite all progress in security and privacy mechanisms, vulnerabilities continue to…
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…
We conduct a large-scale measurement of developers' insecure practices leading to mini-app to super-app authentication bypass, among which hard-coding developer secrets for such authentication is a major contributor. We also analyze the…
Android applications are frequently plagiarized or repackaged, and software obfuscation is a recommended protection against these practices. However, there is very little data on the overall rates of app obfuscation, the techniques used, or…
Mobile apps are used in a variety of health settings, from apps that help providers, to apps designed for patients, to health and fitness apps designed for the general public. These apps ask the user for, and then collect and leak a wealth…
Like most modern software, secure messaging apps rely on third-party components to implement important app functionality. Although this practice reduces engineering costs, it also introduces the risk of inadvertent privacy breaches due 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,…
Android's open-source nature facilitates widespread smartphone accessibility, particularly in price-sensitive markets. System and vendor applications that come pre-installed on budget Android devices frequently operate with elevated…
Today, much of our sensitive information is stored inside mobile applications (apps), such as the browsing histories and chatting logs. To safeguard these privacy files, modern mobile systems, notably Android and iOS, use sandboxes to…
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…
Application markets provide a communication channel between app developers and their end-users in form of app reviews, which allow users to provide feedback about the apps. Although security and privacy in mobile apps are one of the biggest…
Access to privacy-sensitive information on Android is a growing concern in the mobile community. Albeit Google Play recently introduced some privacy guidelines, it is still an open problem to soundly verify whether apps actually comply with…