We are delighted to announce that we received funding for our project “Less is More: Addressing Mobile Application Security and Privacy through Debloating” from Singapore’s National Cybersecurity R&D Programme (NCR) and the Blavatnik Interdisciplinary Cyber Research Center (ICRC) in Israel. The project is a collaboration between David Lo and Debin Gao from Singapore Management University and Shahar Maoz from Tel Aviv University’s School of Computer Science.

The grant provides around $500,000 to study how the security and privacy of mobile applications can be improved with “debloating” — changing some of the functionality of apps on the fly while keeping key functionality working. Our part in the project is building predictive models that can identify code that might compromise the users’ security and privacy, and differentiate it from desirable functionality.