ADVERTISEMENT SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT KIT UNBUNDLING

A system described herein enables advertisement software development kits (SDKs) to be unbundled from applications that use advertisement SDKs. The system provides SDK proxy libraries and advertisement services developed based on the advertisement SDKs. The SDK proxy libraries replace original calls to advertisement SDKs with inter-protocol communication (IPC) calls. The advertisements services receive the IPC calls and, in response, generate views that include advertisements. The advertisement services provide the views to the applications. Rather than the application determining the advertisement views and/or clicks, the system described herein enables the advertisement services to validate views and/or clicks of the advertisement separately from the application. In this way, the system described in this disclosure may prevent the applications from generating fake clicks or fake views while preventing the advertisement services from accessing sensitive data collected by the applications

Insecure Network, Unknown Connection: Understanding Wi-Fi Privacy Assumptions of Mobile Device Users

Smartphones and other mobile devices have proliferated in the past five years. The expectation of mobile device users to always be online has led to Wi-Fi networks being offered by a variety of providers. Using these networks introduces multiple security risks. In this work, we assess to what extent the privacy stance of mobile device users corresponds with their actual behavior by conducting a study with 108 participants. Our methodology consists of monitoring Wi-Fi networks that the participants’ devices connect to and the connections made by apps on these devices, for a period of 30 days. Afterwards, participants are surveyed about their awareness and privacy sensitiveness. We show that while a higher expertise in computer networks corresponds to more awareness about the connections made by apps, neither this expertise nor the actual privacy stance of the participant translates to better security habits. Moreover, participants in general were unaware about a significant part of connections made by apps on their devices, a matter that is worsened by the fact that one third of Wi-Fi networks that participants connect to do not have any security enabled. Based on our results, we provide recommendations to network providers, developers and users on how to improve Wi-Fi security for mobile devices