Abstract: Maintaining the security and privacy hygiene of mobile apps is a critical challenge. Unfortunately, no program analysis algorithm can determine that an application is "secure" or "malware‐free." For example, if an app records audio during a phone call, it may be malware. However, the user may want to use such an app to record phone calls for archival and benign purposes. A key challenge for automated program analysis tools is determining whether or not that behavior is actually desired by the user (i.e., user expectation). This talk presents recent research progress in exploring user expectations in mobile app security and conducting automatic test generation for Android apps.

Short Bio: Tao Xie is an Associate Professor and Willett Faculty Scholar in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. His research interests are in software engineering, focusing on software testing, program analysis, software analytics, software security, and educational software engineering. He is an ACM Distinguished Speaker and an IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Visitor. He is an ACM Distinguished Scientist. His homepage is at   http://taoxie.cs.illinois.edu.