Engineering Commons^™

Finserv Android Application, Harsh Piyushkumar Shah

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The FINSERV Android application is a mobile tool designed for individuals to manage and track their finances. In financially complex world, many people struggle to maintain a clear overview of their income, expenses, and financial goals. This application aims to bridge that gap by providing users with a powerful and user-friendly platform to efficiently monitor and optimize their personal finances.

With the Personal Finance Tracking Android Application, users can effortlessly track their income and expenses, categorize transactions, and gain valuable insights into their spending patterns. The application offers features such as expense categorization and real-time expense tracking.

To enhance usability …

Ahmedabad City App, Rushabh Picha

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The Ahmedabad City App is a city guide app that provides information on the city's accessible resources. The project's goal is to provide a concrete, one-stop platform for finding information on all of Ahmedabad's accessible resources. The main goal is to simplify the railway's schedule and make it easier for customers to get from one point to another swiftly and safely. Emergency connections such as the blood bank, fire department, police station, and hospitals will be included in the app. Restaurants and picnic areas are also included in the rejuvenation process.

The proposed system uses SQLite as the database and …

A Real-World, Hybrid Event Sequence Generation Framework For Android Apps, Jun Sun

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Generating meaningful inputs for Android apps is still a challenging issue that needs more research. Past research efforts have shown that random test generation is still an effective means to exercise User-Interface (UI) events to achieve high code coverage. At the same time, heuristic search approaches can effectively reach specified code targets. Our investigation shows that these approaches alone are insufficient to generate inputs that can exercise specific code locations in complex Android applications.

This thesis introduces a hybrid approach that combines two different input generation techniques--heuristic search based on genetic algorithm and random instigation of UI events, to reach …

Minet Magnetic Indoor Localization, Michael Drake

Honors Theses

Indoor localization is a modern problem of computer science that has no unified solution, as there are significant trade-offs involved with every technique. Magnetic localization, though less popular than WiFi signal based localization, is a sub-field that is rooted in infrastructure-free design, which can allow universal setup. Magnetic localization is also often paired with probabilistic programming, which provides a powerful method of estimation, given a limited understanding of the environment. This thesis presents Minet, which is a particle filter based localization system using the Earth's geomagnetic field. It explores the novel idea of state space limitation as a method of …

Advanced Techniques To Detect Complex Android Malware, Zhiqiang Li

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Android is currently the most popular operating system for mobile devices in the world. However, its openness is the main reason for the majority of malware to be targeting Android devices. Various approaches have been developed to detect malware.

Unfortunately, new breeds of malware utilize sophisticated techniques to defeat malware detectors. For example, to defeat signature-based detectors, malware authors change the malware’s signatures to avoid detection. As such, a more effective approach to detect malware is by leveraging malware’s behavioral characteristics. However, if a behavior-based detector is based on static analysis, its reported results may contain a large number of …

Advanced Security Analysis For Emergent Software Platforms, Mohannad Alhanahnah

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Emergent software ecosystems, boomed by the advent of smartphones and the Internet of Things (IoT) platforms, are perpetually sophisticated, deployed into highly dynamic environments, and facilitating interactions across heterogeneous domains. Accordingly, assessing the security thereof is a pressing need, yet requires high levels of scalability and reliability to handle the dynamism involved in such volatile ecosystems.

This dissertation seeks to enhance conventional security detection methods to cope with the emergent features of contemporary software ecosystems. In particular, it analyzes the security of Android and IoT ecosystems by developing rigorous vulnerability detection methods. A critical aspect of this work is the …

Android And Web Application For Tracking Employees, Kaival Dholakia

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The purpose that this tracking system serves is to keep track of the employees of the company who have the nature of their job which involves a lot of traveling to various locations on a day to day basis. It is an amalgamation of Android as well as a Web application. The employee is supposed to pass the location and image as per the terms and conditions specified to use the Android application. The web application is used by the admin department to access the information which would help them monitor the location of the employee in a timely manner. …

Automated Dynamic Detection Of Self-Hiding Behaviors, Luke Baird

Student Works

Certain Android applications, such as but not limited to malware, conceal their presence from the user, exhibiting a self-hiding behavior. Consequently, these apps put the user’s security and privacy at risk by performing tasks without the user’s awareness. Static analysis has been used to analyze apps for self-hiding behavior, but this approach is prone to false positives and suffers from code obfuscation. This research proposes a set of three tools utilizing a dynamic analysis method of detecting self-hiding behavior of an app in the home, installed, and running application lists on an Android emulator. Our approach proves both highly accurate …

Automated Dynamic Detection Of Self-Hiding Behavior In Android Apps, Luke Baird, Seth Rodgers

Student Works

Android applications that conceal themselves from a user, defined as exhibiting a “self-hiding behavior,” pose a threat to the user’s privacy, as these applications can live on a device undetected by the user. Malicious applications can do this to execute without being found by the user. Three lists are analyzed in particular—the home, running, and installed lists—as they are directly related to the typical Android app life cycle. Additionally, self-hiding behavior in the device admin list is analyzed due to the potential for catastrophic actions to be taken by device admin malware. This research proposes four dynamic analysis tools that …

Gaindroid: General Automated Incompatibility Notifier For Android Applications, Bruno Vieira Resende E Silva

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

With the ever-increasing popularity of mobile devices over the last decade, mobile apps and the frameworks upon which they are built frequently change. This rapid evolution leads to a confusing jumble of devices and applications utilizing differing features even within the same framework. For Android apps and devices, representing over 80% of the market share, mismatches between the version of the Android operating system installed on a device and the version of the app installed, can lead to several run-time crashes, providing a poor user experience.

This thesis presents GAINDroid, an analysis approach, backed with a classloader based program analyzer, …

Permission-Based Privacy Analysis For Android Applications, Erza Gashi, Zhilbert Tafa

International Journal of Business and Technology

While Information and Communication Technology (ICT) trends are moving towards the Internet of Things (IoT), mobile applications are becoming more and more popular. Mostly due to their pervasiveness and the level of interaction with the users, along with the great number of advantages, the mobile applications bring up a great number of privacy related issues as well. These platforms can gather our very sensitive private data by only granting them a list of permissions during the installation process. Additionally, most of the users can find it difficult, or even useless, to analyze system permissions. Thus, their guess of app’s safety …

Exploring Photo Privacy Protection On Smartphones, David Darling

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The proliferation of modern smartphone camera use in the past decade has resulted in unprecedented numbers of personal photos being taken and stored on popular devices. However, it has also caused privacy concerns. These photos sometimes contain potentially harmful information if they were to be leaked such as the personally identifiable information found on ID cards or in legal documents. With current security measures on iOS and Android phones, it is possible for 3rd party apps downloaded from official app stores or other locations to access the photo libraries on these devices without user knowledge or consent. Additionally, the prevalence …

Organize Events Mobile Application, Thakshak Mani Chandra Reddy Gudimetla

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

In a big organization there are many events organized every day. To know about the events, we typically need to check an events page, rely on flyers or on distributed pamphlets or through word of mouth. To register for an event a user now a days typically does this online which involves inputting user details. At the event, the user either signs a sheet of paper or enters credentials in a web page loaded on a tablet or other electronic device. Typically, this is a time-consuming process with many redundancies like entering user details every time the user wants to …

Androparse - An Android Feature Extraction Framework & Dataset, Robert Schmicker, Frank Breitinger, Ibrahim Baggili

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Android malware has become a major challenge. As a consequence, practitioners and researchers spend a significant time analyzing Android applications (APK). A common procedure (especially for data scientists) is to extract features such as permissions, APIs or strings which can then be analyzed. Current state of the art tools have three major issues: (1) a single tool cannot extract all the significant features used by scientists and practitioners (2) Current tools are not designed to be extensible and (3) Existing parsers do not have runtime efficiency. Therefore, this work presents AndroParse which is an open-source Android parser written in Golang …

Book-Hunt! Android Mobile Application Using Indoor Positioning Technology, Sneha Pantam

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Indoor Positioning System (IPS) focuses on locating objects inside

Buildings. Till date, GPS has helped us obtain accurate locations outdoors. These locations have helped us in many ways like navigating to a destination point, tracking people etc. Indoor Positioning System aims at navigating and tracking objects inside buildings. [1] IndoorAtlas is a technology that works on the theory of Indoor Positioning System. Book-Hunt is an Android mobile application which majorly makes use of IndoorAtlas therefore making use of the technique of indoor tracking. This Android mobile application is designed for Libraries. It is designed specifically for John M. Pfau Library, …

Assured Android Execution Environments, Brandon P. Froberg

Theses and Dissertations

Current cybersecurity best practices, techniques, tactics and procedures are insufficient to ensure the protection of Android systems. Software tools leveraging formal methods use mathematical means to assure both a design and implementation for a system and these methods can be used to provide security assurances. The goal of this research is to determine methods of assuring isolation when executing Android software in a contained environment. Specifically, this research demonstrates security properties relevant to Android software containers can be formally captured and validated, and that an implementation can be formally verified to satisfy a corresponding specification. A three-stage methodology called "The …

Cru Android App, Dylan Sun

Computer Science and Software Engineering

The Cru app is focused on connecting students and faculty to one of the many Cru ministries here in San Luis Obispo. The app is capable of connecting individuals to a specific community group and ministry teams, gathering information about upcoming Cru events and gatherings, and direct rideshare capabilities. The Cru Android App utilizes Java and other industry standard technologies to fully deliver a well-rounded user experience and to be connected with Cru. In this project, I increased Cru app’s access control abilities and updated the app overall to be ready for an alpha release.

Using Static Analysis And Dalvik Bytecode On Android Compass Applications To Detect Operational Anomalies, Arti J. Tripathi

Senior Projects Spring 2018

The focus of this paper is the functionality of Android applications and the detection of functional anomalies though a basic static analysis approach. The intention of this research is analyzing applications without running them and detecting how application behavior might correlate with method call patterns. We will focus on simple free compass applications because their ostensible simplicity will make high variation in methods calls an interesting phenomenon. We employ clustering algorithms and other statistical methods to isolate a particularly unusual collection of applications and then perform a qualitative analysis of these applications to discover any interesting common operational behavior or …

If I Had A Million Cryptos: Cryptowallet Application Analysis And A Trojan Proof-Of-Concept, Trevor Haigh, Frank Breitinger, Ibrahim Baggili

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Cryptocurrencies have gained wide adoption by enthusiasts and investors. In this work, we examine seven different Android cryptowallet applications for forensic artifacts, but we also assess their security against tampering and reverse engineering. Some of the biggest benefits of cryptocurrency is its security and relative anonymity. For this reason it is vital that wallet applications share the same properties. Our work, however, indicates that this is not the case. Five of the seven applications we tested do not implement basic security measures against reverse engineering. Three of the applications stored sensitive information, like wallet private keys, insecurely and one was …

Permission-Based Privacy Analysis For Android Applications, Erza Gashi, Zhilbert Tafa

UBT International Conference

While Information and Communication Technology (ICT) trends are moving towards the Internet of Things (IoT), mobile applications are becoming more and more popular. Mostly due to their pervasiveness and the level of interaction with the users, along with the great number of advantages, the mobile applications bring up a great number of privacy related issues as well. These platforms can gather our very sensitive private data by only granting them a list of permissions during the installation process. Additionally, most of the users can find it difficult, or even useless, to analyze system permissions. Thus, their guess of app’s safety …

Breaking Into The Vault: Privacy, Security And Forensic Analysis Of Android Vault Applications, Xiaolu Zhang, Ibrahim Baggili, Frank Breitinger

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

In this work we share the first account for the forensic analysis, security and privacy of Android vault applications. Vaults are designed to be privacy enhancing as they allow users to hide personal data but may also be misused to hide incriminating files. Our work has already helped law enforcement in the state of Connecticut to reconstruct 66 incriminating images and 18 videos in a single criminal case. We present case studies and results from analyzing 18 Android vault applications (accounting for nearly 220 million downloads from the Google Play store) by reverse engineering them and examining the forensic artifacts …

Toward Accurate Network Delay Measurement On Android Phones, Weichao Li, Daoyuan Wu, Rocky K. C. Chang, Ricky K. P. Mok

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Measuring and understanding the performance of mobile networks is becoming very important for end users and operators. Despite the availability of many measurement apps, their measurement accuracy has not received sufficient scrutiny. In this paper, we appraise the accuracy of smartphone-based network performance measurement using the Android platform and the network round-trip time (RTT) as the metric. We show that two of the most popular measurement apps-Ookla Speedtest and MobiPerf-have their RTT measurements inflated. We build three test apps that cover three common measurement methods and evaluate them in a testbed. We overcome the main challenge of obtaining a complete …

Blend It Applications And Server, Rebecca Mckinley, Cory Mayer, Tyler Fox, Alex Bartlett, Aly Chapman

Computer Engineering

No abstract provided.

Djukebox: A Mobile Application Senior Project, Alexander M. Mitchell

Computer Science and Software Engineering

I’m going to discuss the process used to research, design, and develop a mobile application to handle song requests from patrons to disc jockeys. The research phase was completed in the first half of the project, during CSC-491, along with much of the design. The rest of the design and all of the development was completed during CSC-492. Once development began there were times when reverting back to the design phase was needed, which became apparent as more was learned about the mobile platform chosen for development, Android, and the backend server utilized, Google Firebase. Ultimately the project was purely …

The Following Robot, Juan D. Cerda, Matthew S. Kwan, Vi M. Le

Computer Engineering

The objective of this project is to design, build, and test an autonomous robot with an associated Android application. The robot uses on board inertial measurement sensors (magnetometer, accelerometer, gyroscope) and coordinates itself through Bluetooth communication with the similar built­in measurement sensors on the Android phone to mimic and follow movement. The Following Robot incorporates the same basic movement functionality as a typical RC car. The robot follows the user’s phone through an application on one’s phone. This application accesses the phone’s accelerometer and gyroscope data and translates into appropriate conversions. Methods of tracking and calculating distance or angular displacement …

Wireless Window Blinds, Cooper Laone, Niraj Morar, Zachary Malig, Jake Phillips

Electrical Engineering

The Internet of Things asserts that there exists a global need for all objects to connect easily and accessibly. Today, smartphones, tablets, laptops and smart watches makeup just a few of the interconnected devices by the greater population. As a result a growing need for wireless connection between personal devices like phones, and computers to everyday appliances exists. This idea extends directly to households, businesses and buildings, where a growing need for smart home or smart-business appliances has taken root. Many companies like Nest, ADT and Apple make products for automated home security and in home media control. The Wireless …

Droidnet: An Android Application Security Framework Through Crowdsourcing, Pulkit Rustgi, Bilal Ahmed, Mansi Shah

Capstone Design Expo Posters

In the current Android architecture, users have to decide whether an app is safe to use or not by themselves. Savvy users can make correct decisions to avoid unnecessary privacy breaches, however most users are not capable or do not care to make impactful decisions. To assist those users, we propose DroidNet, an Android permission control framework based on crowdsourcing. In this framework, DroidNet runs new apps and their permissions initially, and then collects data based on each individual user’s settings in regards to each permission unique to every installed app. After collecting each user’s data, DroidNet provides recommendations on …

Spirit Of Broad Street Station, Rhey Igou, Allyson Yohe, Kyle Sutherland

Capstone Design Expo Posters

The Science Museum of Virginia used to be an active train station, known as Broad Street Station. The building itself has since been radically renovated and contains a vast history of important visitors and events. The Science Museum has hundreds of beautiful photos from throughout the building’s lifespan, however the average visitor to the museum might not even realize that the museum was once a train station. The goal of this project was to present these photographs in a “story” format as the user is traveling through the museum. This is accomplished with Bluetooth beacons (Estimotes), placed in relevant locations …

Design And Implementation Of An Improved Android Application For Bard Shuttle Services, Chance O'Neihl Wren

Senior Projects Spring 2017

With the growing population of Bard College, the need for the college’s shuttle system continues to grow. As a result, enabling the Bard community to quickly and easily access the shuttle schedules and times, has also become more important in the daily of life of Bard College's inhabitants. Although Bard College has a mobile application for Android and iPhone mobile devices alike, there was a growing demand for a new improved shuttle application for Android mobile devices. This project seeks to improve the functionality, user friendliness, and availability of shuttle schedules to the Bard Community, in the form of a …

Development Of An Android Based Performance Assessment System For Motivational Interviewing Training, Sowmya Pappu

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Motivational Interviewing (MI) has been proved to be an effective Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT) technique. It is an evidence-based practice used to identify, reduce, and prevent problematic use, abuse, and dependence on alcohol and illicit drugs. It emphasizes on patient-centered counseling approach that can help resolve their ambivalence through a non-confrontational, goal-oriented style for eliciting behavior change from the patient, almost like patients talk themselves into change. This approach provokes less resistance and stimulates the progress of patients at their own pace towards deciding about planning, making and sustaining positive behavioral change. Thus, training medical professionals …