Related papers: Visualizing Privacy-Relevant Data Flows in Android…
Data driven research on Android has gained a great momentum these years. The abundance of data facilitates knowledge learning, however, also increases the difficulty of data preprocessing. Therefore, it is non-trivial to prepare a demanding…
Personal data has emerged as a highly valuable yet sensitive asset that drives business decisions, enables targeted advertising, and generates substantial revenue for companies, while simultaneously facilitating invasive monitoring of…
The number of Android smartphone and tablet users has experienced a rapid growth in the past few years and it raises users' awareness on the privacy and security of their mobile devices. The features of openness and extensibility make…
This paper elaborates the use of static source code analysis in the context of data protection. The topic is important for software engineering in order for software developers to improve the protection of personal data during software…
Mobile databases are the statutory backbones of many applications on smartphones, and they store a lot of sensitive information. However, vulnerabilities in the operating system or the app logic can lead to sensitive data leakage by giving…
Privacy labels -- standardized, compact representations of data collection and data use practices -- are often presented as a solution to the shortcomings of privacy policies. Apple introduced mandatory privacy labels for apps in its App…
Context: Post-release user feedback plays an integral role in improving software quality and informing new features. Given its growing importance, feedback concerning security enhancements is particularly noteworthy. In considering the…
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…
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…
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…
The recent privacy leakage incidences and the more strict policy regulations demand a much higher standard of compliance for companies and mobile apps. However, such obligations also impose significant challenges on app developers for…
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…
Despite continuous efforts to build and update network infrastructure, mobile devices in developing regions continue to be constrained by limited bandwidth. Unfortunately, this coincides with a period of unprecedented growth in the size of…
Code cloning is a common practice in software development, but it poses significant security risks by propagating vulnerabilities across cloned segments. To address this challenge, we introduce srcVul, a scalable, precise detection approach…
The Android ecosystem faces a notable challenge known as fragmentation, which denotes the extensive diversity within the system. This issue is mainly related to differences in system versions, device hardware specifications, and…
Ample research has demonstrated that compliance with data protection principles remains limited on the web and mobile. For example, almost none of the apps on the Google Play Store fulfil the minimum requirements regarding consent under EU…
Privacy policy documents are often lengthy, complex, and difficult for non-expert users to interpret, leading to a lack of transparency regarding the collection, processing, and sharing of personal data. As concerns over online privacy…
Context: Digital and physical trails of user activities are collected over the use of software applications and systems. As software becomes ubiquitous, protecting user privacy has become challenging. With the increase of user privacy…
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…
While mobile app evolution has been widely studied, geographical variation in app behavior remains largely unexplored. This paper presents a large-scale study of location-based Android app differentiation, uncovering two important and…