Abstract

In today's highly connected world, mobile and web applications have become integral parts of our daily lives. However, the convenience they provide often comes at the cost of potential security and privacy risks. This talk will explore several emerging security risks on mobile and web platforms, including application virtualization platforms and web tracking. 
We will first discuss application virtualization platforms in Android and discover how the current Android permission model fails to prevent illegal permission usage during app virtualization, allowing apps to exploit shared User IDs and perform unauthorized actions. We will learn about the prevalence and impact of these over-privilege issues in real-world apps, and gain insights into a proposed defense solution that enforces fine-grained permission separation. In the second half of the talk, we will discuss how online advertisers aggressively deploy web tracking techniques, from third-party cookies to fingerprinting scripts, to collect users' sensitive information for targeted advertising, creating a persistent threat to online privacy. We will explore common web tracking and anti-tracking techniques, and gain insights from recent research on web tracking.
 

Bio.

All faculty and students are welcome to join.