Related papers: WOOTdroid: Whole-system Online On-device Tracing f…
In Android, communications between apps and system services are supported by a transaction-based Inter-Process Communication (IPC) mechanism. Binder, as the cornerstone of this IPC mechanism, separates two communicating parties as client…
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…
Bugs that surface in mobile applications can be difficult to reproduce and fix due to several confounding factors including the highly GUI-driven nature of mobile apps, varying contextual states, differing platform versions and device…
User tracking is critical in the mobile ecosystem, which relies on device identifiers to build clear user profiles. In earlier ages, Android allowed easy access to non-resettable device identifiers like device serial numbers and IMEI by…
We present BPFroid -- a novel dynamic analysis framework for Android that uses the eBPF technology of the Linux kernel to continuously monitor events of user applications running on a real device. The monitored events are collected from…
We describe a workflow used to analyze the source code of the {\sc Android OS kernel} and rate for a particular kind of bugginess that exposes a program to hacking. The workflow represents a novel approach for components' vulnerability…
Android applications (apps) grow dramatically in recent years. Apps are user interface (UI) centric typically. Rapid UI responsiveness is key consideration to app developers. However, we still lack a handy tool for profiling app performance…
As the complexity of mobile applications grows exponentially and the fragmentation of user device environments intensifies, ensuring online application stability faces unprecedented challenges. Traditional methods, such as static logging…
Android allows apps to communicate with its system services via system service helpers so that these apps can use various functions provided by the system services. Meanwhile, the system services rely on their service helpers to enforce…
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…
Wearable devices such as smartwatches, fitness trackers, and blood-pressure monitors process, store, and communicate sensitive and personal information related to the health, life-style, habits and interests of the wearer. This data is…
To find the cause of a functional or non-functional defect (bug) in software running on a multi-processor System-on-Chip (MPSoC), developers need insight into the chip. Tracing systems provide this insight non-intrusively, at the cost of…
While extremely valuable to achieve advanced functions, mobile phone sensors can be abused by attackers to implement malicious activities in Android apps, as experimentally demonstrated by many state-of-the-art studies. There is hence a…
Voice control is a popular way to operate mobile devices, enabling users to communicate requests to their devices. However, adversaries can leverage voice control to trick mobile devices into executing commands to leak secrets or to modify…
Widely-used Android static program analysis tools, e.g., Amandroid and FlowDroid, perform the whole-app inter-procedural analysis that is comprehensive but fundamentally difficult to handle modern (large) apps. The average app size has…
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…
While smartphones and WiFi networks are bringing many positive changes to people's lives, they are susceptible to traffic analysis attacks, which infer user's private information from encrypted traffic. Existing traffic analysis attacks…
Mobile apps increasingly rely on real-time sensor and system data to adapt their behavior to user context. While emulators and instrumented builds offer partial solutions, they often fail to support reproducible testing of context-sensitive…
Google's Android is a comprehensive software framework for mobile communication devices (i.e., smartphones, PDAs). The Android framework includes an operating system, middleware and a set of key applications. The incorporation of integrated…
The Android system manages access to sensitive APIs by permission enforcement. An application (app) must declare proper permissions before invoking specific Android APIs. However, there is no official documentation providing the complete…