A case for lease-based, utilitarian resource management on mobile devices

May 31, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments

A case for lease-based, utilitarian resource management on mobile devices Hu et al., ASPLOS'19 I’ve chosen another energy-related paper to end the week, addressing a problem many people can relate to: apps that drain your battery. LeaseOS borrows the concept of a lease from distributed systems, but with a rather nice twist, and is able ... Continue Reading

Google workloads for consumer devices: mitigating data movement bottlenecks

April 18, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

Google workloads for consumer devices: mitigating data movement bottlenecks Boroumand et al., ASPLOS'18 What if your mobile device could be twice as fast on common tasks, greatly improving the user experience, while at the same time significantly extending your battery life? This is the feat that the authors of today’s paper pull-off, using a technique ... Continue Reading

Bug fixes, improvements, … and privacy leaks

March 6, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

Bug fixes, improvements, ... and privacy leaks. A longitudinal study of PII leaks across Android app versions Ren et al., NDSS’18 It’s another cut of similar data today, but this time looking at how privacy information is leaked over time in different versions of an (Android mobile) app. You probably don’t need to read the ... Continue Reading

Apps, trackers, privacy, and regulators: a global study of the mobile tracking ecosystem

March 5, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments

Apps, trackers, privacy, and regulators: a global study of the mobile tracking ecosystem Razaghpanah et al., NDSS’18 Sadly you probably won’t be surprised to learn that this study reveals user tracking is widespread within the mobile app (Android) ecosystem. The focus is on third-party services included in apps, identified by the network domains they try ... Continue Reading

Hindsight: understanding the evolution of UI vulnerabilities in mobile browsers

December 5, 2017 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

Hindsight: understanding the evolution of UI vulnerabilities in mobile browsers Luo et al., CCS’17 Towards the end of last year, browsing on mobile devices overtook browsing on the desktop. And so when we think about mobile security, in addition to thinking about malicious applications, we also need to start thinking much more seriously about mobile ... Continue Reading

Cloak and dagger: from two permissions to complete control of the UI feedback loop

June 23, 2017 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

Cloak and dagger: from two permissions to complete control of the UI feedback loop Fratantonio et al., IEEE Security and Privacy 2017 If you're using Android, then 'cloak and dagger' is going to make for scary reading. It's a perfect storm of an almost undetectable attack that can capture passwords, pins, and ultimately obtain all ... Continue Reading

Apps with hardware: enabling run-time architectural customization in smart phones

May 26, 2017 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

Apps with hardware: enabling run-time architectural customization in smart phones Coughlin et al., USENIX ATC'16 This week we've had a couple of hardware-related papers, and one touching on mobile apps (in the context of DNNs). Today's choice brings those themes together with some really creative thinking - programmable hardware for smartphones! With thanks to Afshaan ... Continue Reading

Neurosurgeon: collaborative intelligence between the cloud and the mobile edge

May 25, 2017 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

Neurosurgeon: collaborative intelligence between the cloud and mobile edge Kang et al., ASPLOS'17 For a whole class of new intelligent personal assistant applications that process images, videos, speech, and text using deep neural networks, the common wisdom is that you really need to run the processing in the cloud to take advantage of powerful clusters ... Continue Reading

MaMaDroid: Detecting Android malware by building Markov chains of behavorial models

March 9, 2017November 11, 2019 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

MaMaDroid: Detecting Android malware by building Markov chains of behavioral models, Mariconti et al., NDSS 2017 Pick any security conference of your choosing, and you're sure to find plenty of papers examining the security of Android. It can paint a pretty bleak picture, but at the same time the Android ecosystem also seems to have ... Continue Reading

Diamond: Automating data management and storage for wide-area, reactive applications

December 13, 2016November 11, 2019 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

Diamond: Automating data management and storage for wide-area, reactive applications Zhang et al., OSDI 2016 Diamond tackles the end-to-end problem of building reactive applications, defined here as those that update end-user visible state without requiring any explicit user action: … today’s popular applications are reactive: they provide users with the illusion of continuous synchronization across ... Continue Reading

the morning paper

a random walk through Computer Science research, by Adrian Colyer
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