Related papers: How Far are App Secrets from Being Stolen? A Case …
In developing countries, several key sectors, including education, finance, agriculture, and healthcare, mainly deliver their services via mobile app technology on handheld devices. As a result, mobile app security has emerged as a…
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…
The proliferation of mobile applications and the subsequent sharing of personal data with service and application providers have given rise to substantial privacy concerns. Application marketplaces have introduced mechanisms to conform to…
Privacy policies are long, complex documents that end-users seldom read. Privacy labels aim to ameliorate these issues by providing succinct summaries of salient data practices. In December 2020, Apple began requiring that app developers…
Digital lending applications, commonly referred to as loan apps, have become a primary channel for microcredit in emerging markets. However, many of these apps demand excessive permissions and misuse sensitive user data for coercive…
We study the temporal dynamics of potentially harmful apps (PHAs) on Android by leveraging 8.8M daily on-device detections collected among 11.7M customers of a popular mobile security product between 2019 and 2020. We show that the current…
Mobile healthcare (mHealth) applications promise convenient, continuous patient-provider interaction but also introduce severe and often underexamined security and privacy risks. We present an end-to-end audit of 272 Android mHealth apps…
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…
The industry for children's apps is thriving at the cost of children's privacy: these apps routinely disclose children's data to multiple data trackers and ad networks. As children spend increasing time online, such exposure accumulates to…
With the Increasing use of Machine Learning in Android applications, more research and efforts are being put into developing better-performing machine learning algorithms with a vast amount of data. Along with machine learning for mobile…
This paper investigates changes over time in the behavior of Android ad libraries. Taking a sample of 100,000 apps, we extract and classify the ad libraries. By considering the release dates of the applications that use a specific ad…
Performance issues in Android applications significantly undermine users' experience, engagement, and retention, which is a long-lasting research topic in academia. Unlike functionality issues, performance issues are more difficult to…
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.…
E-commerce mobile applications are central to global financial transactions, making their security and privacy crucial. In this study, we analyze 92 top-grossing Android e-commerce apps (58 U.S.-based and 34 international) using MobSF,…
The Android operating system runs on the majority of smartphones nowadays. Its success is driven by its availability to a variety of smartphone hardware vendors on the one hand, and the customization possibilities given to its users on the…
Smartphones contain a trove of sensitive personal data including our location, who we talk to, our habits, and our interests. Smartphone users trade access to this data by permitting apps to use it, and in return obtain functionality…
Android introduces a new permission model that allows apps to request permissions at runtime rather than at the installation time since 6.0 (Marshmallow, API level 23). While this runtime permission model provides users with greater…
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…
Internet of Things is growing rapidly, with many connected devices now available to consumers. With this growth, the IoT apps that manage the devices from smartphones raise significant security concerns. Typically, these apps are secured…
Recent studies have revealed that 87 % to 96 % of the Android apps using cryptographic APIs have a misuse which may cause security vulnerabilities. As previous studies did not conduct a qualitative examination of the validity and severity…