arXiv subjects

Rashid Tahir

Publications and source records attributed to Rashid Tahir.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

(Mis-)Informed Consent: Predatory Apps and the Exploitation of Populations with Limited Literacy

Among populations with limited literacy in emerging digital markets, the adoption of mobile phones, combined with comprehension barriers and poor cybersecurity hygiene, has created hidden privacy risks. This paper examines how informed consent is often abused by predatory financial applications, leading to financial scams that disproportionately affect users with low literacy. We focus on predatory loan, gambling, and trading apps, analyzing a dataset of 50 Google Play Store apps to measure how many omit or obfuscate critical privacy disclosures. We also evaluate comprehension gaps among users with low literacy via a targeted user study and assess whether Large Language Model (LLM)-generated summaries, translations, and visual cues can improve consent clarity. Our findings show that 85% of study participants did not understand basic app permissions, underscoring the urgent need for stronger regulatory oversight and scalable LLM-driven privacy-literacy tools.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2023

WASEF: Web Acceleration Solutions Evaluation Framework

The World Wide Web has become increasingly complex in recent years. This complexity severely affects users in the developing regions due to slow cellular data connectivity and usage of low-end smartphone devices. Existing solutions to simplify the Web are generally evaluated using several different metrics and settings, which hinders the comparison of these solutions against each other. Hence, it is difficult to select the appropriate solution for a specific context and use case. This paper presents Wasef, a framework that uses a comprehensive set of timing, saving, and quality metrics to evaluate and compare different web complexity solutions in a reproducible manner and under realistic settings. The framework integrates a set of existing state-of-the-art solutions and facilitates the addition of newer solutions down the line. Wasef first creates a cache of web pages by crawling both landing and internal ones. Each page in the cache is then passed through a web complexity solution to generate an optimized version of the page. Finally, each optimized version is evaluated in a consistent manner using a uniform environment and metrics. We demonstrate how the framework can be used to compare and contrast the performance characteristics of different web complexity solutions under realistic conditions. We also show that the accessibility to pages in developing regions can be significantly improved, by evaluating the top 100 global pages in the developed world against the top 100 pages in the lowest 50 developing countries. Results show a significant difference in terms of complexity and a potential benefit for our framework in improving web accessibility in these countries.

cs.PF↗

arXiv2021

Making Honey Files Sweeter: SentryFS -- A Service-Oriented Smart Ransomware Solution

The spread of ransomware continues to cause devastation and is a major concern for the security community. An often-used technique against this threat is the use of honey (or canary) files, which serve as ``trip wires'' to detect ransomware in its early stages. However, in our analysis of ransomware samples from the wild, we discovered that attackers are well-aware of these traps, and newer variants use several evasive strategies to bypass traditional honey files. Hence, we present the design of SentryFS - a specialized file system that strategically ``sprays'' specially-crafted honey files across the file system. The canaries are generated using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and the content and the metadata is constantly updated to make the canaries appear more attractive for smarter ransomware that is selective in choosing victim files. Furthermore, to assist with the management of the honey files, SentryFS connects with an anti-ransomware web service to download the latest intelligence on novel ransomware strategies to update the canaries. Finally, as a contingency, SentryFS also leverages file clones to prevent processes from writing to files directly in the event a highly stealthy ransomware goes undetected. In this case, the ransomware encrypts the clones rather than the actual files, leaving users' data unmodified. An AI agent then assigns a suspicion score to the write activity so that users can approve/discard the changes. As an early-warning system, the proposed design might help mitigate the problem of ransomware.

cs.CR↗