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1. An Exploratory Analysis of Mobile Security Tools

   Shahriar, Hossain; Talukder, Md Arabin; Islam, Md Saiful (October 2019, Conference on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice)

   The growing market of the mobile application is overtaking the web application. Mobile application development environment is open source, which attracts new inexperienced developers to gain hands on experience with application development. However, the security of data and vulnerable coding practice is an issue. Among all mobile Operating systems such as, iOS (by Apple), Android (by Google) and Blackberry (RIM), Android dominates the market. The majority of malicious mobile attacks take advantage of vulnerabilities in mobile applications, such as sensitive data leakage via the inadvertent or side channel, unsecured sensitive data storage, data transition and many others. Most of these vulnerabilities can be detected during mobile application analysis phase. In this paper, we explore vulnerability detection for static and dynamic analysis tools. We also suggest limitations of the tools and future directions such as the development of new plugins. 

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2. Intent to share: enhancing Android inter-component communication for distributed devices

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3197231.3197245  

   Cruz, Breno Dantas; Tilevich, Eli (January 2018, Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems)

   Data-intensive applications in diverse domains, including video streaming, gaming, and health monitoring, increasingly require that mobile devices directly share data with each other. However, developing distributed data sharing functionality introduces low-level, brittle, and hard-to-maintain code into the mobile codebase. To reconcile the goals of programming convenience and performance efficiency, we present a novel middleware framework that enhances the Android platform's component model to support seamless and efficient inter-device data sharing. Our framework provides a familiar programming interface that extends the ubiquitous Android Inter-Component Communication (ICC), thus lowering the learning curve. Unlike middleware platforms based on the RPC paradigm, our programming abstractions require that mobile application developers think through and express explicitly data transmission patterns, thus treating latency as a first-class design concern. Our performance evaluation shows that using our framework incurs little performance overhead, comparable to that of custom-built implementations. By providing reusable programming abstractions that preserve component encapsulation, our framework enables Android devices to efficiently share data at the component level, providing powerful building blocks for the development of emerging distributed mobile applications. 

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3. SEGUL: Ultrafast, memory‐efficient and mobile‐friendly software for manipulating and summarizing phylogenomic datasets

   https://doi.org/10.1111/1755-0998.13964  

   Handika, Heru; Esselstyn, Jacob A (April 2024, Molecular Ecology Resources)

   Abstract Phylogenetic studies now routinely require manipulating and summarizing thousands of data files. For most of these tasks, currently available software requires considerable computing resources and substantial knowledge of command‐line applications. We develop an ultrafast and memory‐efficient software, SEGUL, that performs common phylogenomic dataset manipulations and calculates statistics summarizing essential data features. Our software is available as standalone command‐line interface (CLI) and graphical user interface (GUI) applications, and as a library for Rust, R and Python, with possible support of other languages. The CLI and library versions run native on Windows, Linux and macOS, including Apple ARM Macs. The GUI version extends support to include mobile iOS, iPadOS and Android operating systems. SEGUL leverages the high performance of the Rust programming language to offer fast execution times and low memory footprints regardless of dataset size and platform choice. The inclusion of a GUI minimizes bioinformatics barriers to phylogenomics while SEGUL's efficiency reduces economic barriers by allowing analysis on inexpensive hardware. Our support for mobile operating systems further enables teaching phylogenomics where access to computing power is limited. 

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4. DroidScraper: A Tool for Android In-Memory Object Recovery and Reconstruction

   Ali-Gombe, Aisha and (September 2019, 22nd International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses ({RAID} 2019))

   null (Ed.)

   There is a growing need for post-mortem analysis in forensics investigations involving mobile devices, particularly when application-specific behaviors must be analyzed. This is especially true for architectures such as Android, where traditional kernel-level memory analysis frameworks such as Volatility face serious challenges recovering and providing context for user-space artifacts. In this research work, we developed an app-agnostic userland memory analysis technique that targets the new Android Runtime (ART). Leveraging its latest memory allocation algorithms, called region-based memory management, we develop a system called DroidScraper that recovers vital runtime data structures for applications by enumerating and reconstructing allocated objects from a process memory image. The result of our evaluation shows DroidScraper can recover and decode nearly 90% of all live objects in all allocated memory regions. 

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5. Defining A Design Space of The Auto-Mobile Office: A Computational Abstraction Hierarchy Analysis

   https://doi.org/10.1177/1071181320641068  

   Li, Mengyao; Katrahmani, Atefeh; Kamaraj, Amudha V.; Lee, John D. (December 2020, Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting)

   One advantage of highly automated vehicles is drivers can use commute time for non-driving tasks, such as work-related tasks. The potential for an auto-mobile office—a space where drivers work in automated vehicles—is a complex yet underexplored idea. This paper begins to define a design space of the auto- mobile office in SAE Level 3 automated vehicles by integrating the affinity diagram (AD) with a computational representation of the abstraction hierarchy (AH). The AD uses a bottom-up approach where researchers starting with individual findings aggregate and abstract those into higher-level concepts. The AH uses a top-down approach where researchers start with first principles to identify means-ends links between system goals and concrete forms of the system. Using the programming language R, the means-ends links of AH can be explored statistically. This computational approach to the AH provides a systematic means to define the design space of the auto-mobile office. 

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