Since the surge in popularity of Android smartphones, creating Android applications and using location data in these applications have soared. Due to how quickly Android applications are being created, it is difficult for companies who have created forensics tools to keep updating their programs in a timely manner for investigators to use. This has created a need for a forensics tool which allo...

This thesis presents the design and implementation of a software framework for distributed reasoning on Android devices. The JPR Agent Library can be used to create agents directly from a Prolog implementation deployable on Android. Each agent contains a knowledge base(KB) and an inference engine. Knowledge sharing is facilitated through a simple message passing scheme. A sample Android applica...

Android is a victim of its own success, not just in the way it has attracted malicious attention, but in its very nature. One of the reasons the OS has succeeded in gaining market share so rapidly is that it is open source; it is essentially free for manufacturers to implement. Android platform provide only coarse-grained permissions to users with regard to how third party applications use sens...

Clustering has been well studied for desktop malware analysis as an effective triage method. Conventional similarity-based clustering techniques, however, cannot be immediately applied to Android malware analysis due to the excessive use of third-party libraries in Android application development and the widespread use of repackaging in malware development. We design and implement an Android ma...

In this paper, we experimentally examined whether changes in the facial expressions of teleoperated androids could affect and regulate operators’ emotion, based on the facial feedback theory of emotion and the phenomenon of body ownership transfer to the robot. Twenty-six Japanese participants had conversations with an experimenter based on a situation where participants feel anger and, during ...

The modern day Smartphone’s have built in apps like “WhatsApp & Viber” which allow users to exchange instant messages, share videos, audio’s and images via Smartphone’s instead of relying on their desktop Computers or laptop thereby increasing the portability and convenience for a layman smart phone user. An Instant Messenger (IM) can serve as a very useful yet very dangerous platform for the v...

Being one of the major operating system in smartphone industry, security in Android is paramount importance to end users. Android applications are published through Google Play Store which is an official marketplace for Android. If we have to define the current security policy implemented by Google Play Store for publishing Android applications in one sentence then we can write it as “all are s...

Android Pattern, form of graphical passwords used on Android smartphones, is widely adopted by users. In theory, Android Pattern is more secure than a 5-digit PIN scheme. Users’ graphical passwords, however, are known to be very skewed. They often include predictable shapes (e.g., Z and N), biases in selection of starting point, and predictable sequences of the points that make them easy to gue...

Google’s Android platform includes a permission model that protects access to sensitive capabilities, such as Internet access, GPS use, and telephony. We have found that Android’s current permissions are often overly broad, providing apps with more access than they truly require. This deviation from least privilege increases the threat from vulnerabilities and malware. To address this issue, we...

Android, iOS, and Windows 8 are changing the application architecture of consumer operating systems. These new architectures required OS designers to rethink security and access control. While the new security architectures improve on traditional desktop and server OS designs, they lack sufficient protection semantics for different classes of OS customers (e.g., consumer, enterprise, and govern...