Android Rooting: Methods, Detection, and Evasion
User root their Android (or jailbreak their iPhone) smartphones. They do so in order to run useful apps that require root privileges, to remove restrictions by carriers and hardware manufacturers, and to alter or remove system apps.
How Much Can Chunking Help to Remember Banking PINs?
To ensure that users do not choose weak personal identification numbers (PINs), many banks give out system-generated random PINs. 4-digit is the most commonly used PIN length, but 6-digit system-generated PINs are also becoming popular. The increased security we get from using system-generated PINs, however, comes at the cost of memorability. And while banks are […]
Touch ID: How Does It Affect iPhone Security?
Recently, Apple has introduced Touch ID, which allows a fingerprint-based authentication to be used for iPhone unlocking. It’s positioned to allow users to use stronger passcodes for locking their iOS devices, without substantially sacrificing usability. It is unclear, however, if users take advantage of Touch ID technology and if they, indeed, employ stronger passcodes. In order to […]
Improving Detection of OSN Fakes by Predicting Victims
LERSSE student Yazan Boshmaf (co-supervised with Matei Ripeanu) has presented at NDSS last part of his Ph.D. research, Integro. It helps OSNs detect automated fake accounts using a robust user ranking scheme. The key idea is based on an insight that victims, benign users who control real accounts and have befriended fakes, form a distinct classification category that is useful for designing robust […]
Improving Access Review with AuthzMap
Research led by LERSSE Ph.D. student Pooya Jaferian will be featured at SOUPS this July. By interviewing IT professionals, he has explored access review activity in organizations, and then modeled access review in the activity theory framework. The model suggests that access review requires an understanding of the activity context including information about the users, their job, their access rights, and the history of […]