The absence of explicit architectural constructs in mainstream programming languages has prevented software developers from achieving the many benefits of architecture-based development. To address this issue, Java 9 has introduced the Java Platform Module System (JPMS), resulting in the first instance of modules with rich software architectural interfaces added to a mainstream programming language. JPMS aims to support the encapsulation, security, and maintainability of Java applications and the JDK.
Android is the dominant mobile platform with 85% market share, as of the first quarter of 2017. At the same time, the number and sophistication of malicious Android apps are increasin.
Multi-criteria test-suite minimization aims to remove redundant test cases from a test suite based on some criteria such as code coverage, while trying to optimally maintain the capability of the reduced suite based on other criteria such as fault-detection effectiveness. Existing techniques addressing this problem with integer linear programming claim to produce optimal solutions. However, the multi-criteria test-suite minimization problem is inherently nonlinear, due to the fact that test cases are often dependent on each other in terms of test-case criteria.
Permission-induced attacks, i.e., security breaches enabled by permission misuse, are among the most critical and frequent issues threatening the security of Android devices. By ignoring the temporal aspects of an attack during the analysis and enforcement, the state-of-the-art approaches aimed at protecting the users against such attacks are prone to have low-coverage in detection and high-disruption in prevention of permission-induced attacks. To address the aforementioned shortcomings, we present Terminator, a temporal permission analysis and enforcement framework for Android.
Although a wide variety of approaches identify vulnerabilities in Android apps, none attempt to determine exploitability of those vulnerabilities. Exploitability can aid in reducing false positives of vulnerability analysis, and can help engineers triage bugs. Specifically, one of the main attack vectors of Android apps is their inter-component communication (ICC) interface, where apps may receive messages called Intents.
The rising popularity of mobile apps deployed on battery-constrained devices underlines the need for effectively evaluating their energy properties. However, currently there is a lack of testing tools for evaluating the energy properties of apps. As a result, for energy testing, developers are relying on tests intended for evaluating the functional correctness of apps. Such tests may not be adequate for revealing energy defects and inefficiencies in apps.
Recent introduction of a dynamic permission model in Android, allowing the users to grant and revoke permissions a at the installation of an app, has made it much harder to properly test apps. Since an app's behavior may change depending on the granted permissions, it needs to be tested under a wide range of granted permission combinations.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging technology powered by smart devices that increasingly pervades our environments and practices. The process of incorporating technology into one's practices involves use and adaptation of the technology and is usually referred to as appropriation. In research about IoT, appropriation of IoT technology is a rather new topic. It is necessary to understand how appropriation takes place in order to be able to provide strong support for it in the design of technology.
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