Smartphone and tablet are becoming more like personal computer. It is important to understand the pros and cons of different programming models in these kinds of mobile devices. In order to fully understand their implications to the platform architecture and their technical correlation, we develop variants of the same representative Android application in all of the three sets of APIs provided ...

Android embodies security mechanisms at both OS and application level. In this platform application security is built primarily upon a system of permissions which specify restrictions on the operations a particular process can perform. The critical role of these security mechanisms makes them a prime target for (formal) verification. We present an idealized model of a reference monitor of the n...

Android's intent framework serves as the primary method for interprocess communication (IPC) among apps. The increased volume of intent IPC present in Android devices, coupled with intent's ability to implicitly nd valid receivers for IPC, bring about new security challenges. We propose Intentio Ex Machina (IEM), an access control solution for Android intent security. IEM separates the logic fo...

The popularity of Android applications have grown dramatically in the last few years. Android applications run on mobile devices that have limited memory resources. Although Android has its own memory manager with garbage collection support, many applications currently suffer from memory leak vulnerabilities. These applications may crash due to out of memory error while running, and this will l...

With the development of modern technology and Android Smartphone, Smart Living is gradually changing people’s life. Bluetooth technology, which aims to exchange data wirelessly in a short distance using short-wavelength radio transmissions, is providing a necessary technology to create convenience, intelligence and controllability. In this paper, a new Smart Living system called home lighting c...

Smartphones and tablets are rapidly become indispensable in every day activities. Android has become the most popular operating system for mobile environments in the world. These devices, owing to the open nature of Android, are continuously exposed to attacks, mostly to data exfiltration and monetary fraud. There are many techniques to embed the bad code, i.e. the instructions able to perform ...

Today mobile devices and their application marketplaces drive the entire economy of the mobile landscape. For instance, Android platforms alone have produced staggering revenues exceeding 9 billion USD, which unfortunately attracts cybercriminals with malware now hitting the Android markets at an alarmingly rising pace. To better understand this slew of threats, we present CopperDroid, an autom...

In the evolution of Android, the Mandatory Access Control (MAC) at the level of Linux kernel is assuming a central role. In the commonly used Discretionary Access Control (DAC), every resource has an owner that defines who can access the resource. In the MAC schema, instead, the access privileges are defined in a global policy, that is enforced by the kernel. Only the system administrator can c...

With the popularity and increase in the number of smartphone users, the spread of mobile malware on Android platform has increased. Current intelligent terminal based on the Android has occupied most of the market, and the number of malware aiming at Android platform is also increasing with the increase in the smartphone users. The popularity of the smartphones, the large market share of androi...

We present the first concept for full-fledged app sandboxing on stock Android. Our approach is based on application virtualization and process-based privilege separation to securely encapsulate untrusted apps in an isolated environment. In contrast to all related work on stock Android, we eliminate the necessity to modify the code of monitored apps, and thereby overcome existing legal concerns ...