New iOS UI Automation Library for Security Analyses

Next week, the paper "WhisperTest: A Voice-Control-based Library for iOS UI Automation", co-authored by Steven Monteiro and Andrea Continella (SCS), will be presented at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2025.

CCS is one of the top and largest conferences in cybersecurity, attracting leading researchers worldwide. The paper proposes a novel approach to automate dynamic analysis of iOS mobile apps and presents an open-source library, WhisperTest, implementing such an approach. The paper also demonstrates WhisperTest’s capabilities through a diverse set of security tasks, including a web privacy measurement and a fully-automated dynamic analysis of 200 child-directed iOS apps, which uncovered widespread use of third-party tracking, limited recognition of user consent, and unencrypted HTTP requests.

The co-authors of the paper are:  Zahra Moti, Tom Janssen-Groesbeek, Gunes Acar (Radboud University).