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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…
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…
Android users are increasingly concerned with the privacy of their data and security of their devices. To improve the security awareness of users, recent automatic techniques produce security-centric descriptions by performing program…
Android and Facebook provide third-party applications with access to users' private data and the ability to perform potentially sensitive operations (e.g., post to a user's wall or place phone calls). As a security measure, these platforms…
Prior studies on mobile app analysis often analyze apps across different categories or focus on a small set of apps within a category. These studies either provide general insights for an entire app store which consists of millions of apps,…
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…
The proliferation of mobile applications (apps) has made it crucial to ensure their accessibility for users with disabilities. However, there is a lack of research on the real-world challenges developers face in implementing mobile…
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…
Android's permission system is designed to balance usability with informed consent, yet two legacy mechanisms still undermine that balance in Android 16: (i) permission groups that silently auto-grant new permissions within a group after a…
GitHub provides developers with a practical way to distribute source code and collaboratively work on common projects. To enhance account security and privacy, GitHub allows its users to manage access permissions, review audit logs, and…
As technology and technology companies have grown in power, ubiquity, and societal influence, some companies -- and notably some mobile apps -- have come to be perceived as privacy threats. Prior work has considered how various factors…
The packaging model of Android apps requires the entire code necessary for the execution of an app to be shipped into one single apk file. Thus, an analysis of Android apps often visits code which is not part of the functionality delivered…
Authorship identification is the process of identifying and classifying authors through given codes. Authorship identification can be used in a wide range of software domains, e.g., code authorship disputes, plagiarism detection, exposure…
In this paper, we seek to better understand Android obfuscation and depict a holistic view of the usage of obfuscation through a large-scale investigation in the wild. In particular, we focus on four popular obfuscation approaches:…
Software systems are ubiquitous, and their use is ingrained in our everyday lives. They enable us to get in touch with people quickly and easily, support us in gathering information, and help us perform our daily tasks. In return, we…
There are over one million apps on Google Play Store and over half a million publishers. Having such a huge number of apps and developers can pose a challenge to app users and new publishers on the store. Discovering apps can be challenging…
There are over 1.2 million applications on the Google Play store today with a large number of competing applications for any given use or function. This creates challenges for users in selecting the right application. Moreover, some of the…
The permission mechanism in the Android Framework is integral to safeguarding the privacy of users by managing users' and processes' access to sensitive resources and operations. As such, developers need to be equipped with an in-depth…
Data Minimization (DM) is a privacy practice that requires minimizing the use of user data in software systems. However, continuous privacy incidents that compromise user data suggest that the requirements of DM are not adequately…
Apps on mobile phones manipulate all sorts of data, including sensitive data, leading to privacy-related concerns. Recent regulations like the European GDPR provide rules for the processing of personal and sensitive data, like that no such…