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Many Android applications collect data from users. The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires vendors to faithfully disclose which data their apps collect. This task is complicated because many apps use…
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 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…
The Google Play marketplace has introduced the Data Safety section to improve transparency regarding how mobile applications (apps) collect, share, and protect user data. This mechanism requires developers to disclose privacy and…
Due to the amount of data that smartphone applications can potentially access, platforms enforce permission systems that allow users to regulate how applications access protected resources. If users are asked to make security decisions too…
Most contemporary mobile devices offer hardware-backed storage for cryptographic keys, user data, and other sensitive credentials. Such hardware protects credentials from extraction by an adversary who has compromised the main operating…
As the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to evolve, smartphones have become essential components of IoT systems. However, with the increasing amount of personal information stored on smartphones, user privacy is at risk of being…
File-based encryption (FBE) schemes have been developed by software vendors to address security concerns related to data storage. While methods of encrypting data-at-rest may seem relatively straightforward, the main proponents of these…
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…
Android apps should be designed to cope with stop-start events, which are the events that require stopping and restoring the execution of an app while leaving its state unaltered. These events can be caused by run-time configuration…
Android is a widely used operating system that employs a permission-based access control model. The Android Permissions System (APS) is responsible for mediating application resource requests. APS is a critical component of the Android…
Mobile apps frequently use Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and WiFi scanning permissions to discover nearby devices like peripherals and connect to WiFi Access Points (APs). However, wireless interfaces also serve as a covert proxy for…
With mobile applications and associated services becoming increasingly popular, concerns are being raised about private data leakages have raised. Previous solutions to this well-known set of problems have approached it from the ground up…
Like many desktop operating systems in the 1990s, Android is now in the process of including support for multi-user scenarios. Because these scenarios introduce new threats to the system, we should have an understanding of how well the…
Personal sensory data is used by context-aware mobile applications to provide utility. However, the same data can also be used by an adversary to make sensitive inferences about a user thereby violating her privacy. We present DEEProtect, a…
Sensors embedded in mobile smart devices can monitor users' activity with high accuracy to provide a variety of services to end-users ranging from precise geolocation, health monitoring, and handwritten word recognition. However, this…
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…
Android devices are equipped with many pre-installed applications which have the capability of tracking and monitoring users. Although applications coming pre-installed pose a great danger to user security and privacy, they have received…
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…
Although there are over 1,600,000 third-party Android apps in the Google Play Store, little has been conclusively shown about how their individual (and collective) permission usage has evolved over time. Recently, Android 6 overhauled the…