Collected research

The Betrayal at Cloud City: An Empirical Analysis of Cloud-Based Mobile Backends

The Betrayal At Cloud City: An Empirical Analysis Of Cloud-Based Mobile Backends

Omar Alrawi, Chaoshun Zuo, Ruian Duan, Ranjita Pai Kasturi, Zhiqiang Lin and Brendan Saltaformaggio · usenix.org

An automated pipeline called SkyWalker extracts the backend URLs an Android app contacts and remotely vets those cloud services. Across the top 5,000 free Play Store apps it found 983 N-day and 655 0-day vulnerabilities in backend operating systems, services and web apps, exposing users of apps with 1M to 500M installs, often through third-party SDKs the developer never chose.

Record

Document

The Betrayal At Cloud City: An Empirical Analysis Of Cloud-Based Mobile Backends

Researcher

Omar Alrawi, Chaoshun Zuo, Ruian Duan, Ranjita Pai Kasturi, Zhiqiang Lin and Brendan Saltaformaggio

Published by

usenix.org

Topic

Server

In the archive

• Collected in the 2019 research round

Related sources

• USENIX Security '19 - The Betrayal At Cloud City: An Empirical Analysis Of Cloud-Based Mobile

Tags

• android
• supply-chain
• rest-api
• tooling
• static-analysis
• measurement-study
• large-scale-scan
• cve
• owasp-a06-2021

This page is the archive's own catalogue record. The research is the work of Omar Alrawi, Chaoshun Zuo, Ruian Duan, Ranjita Pai Kasturi, Zhiqiang Lin and Brendan Saltaformaggio, first published at the original source. Preserved copies are kept so the citation survives its host; this one was last captured on 19 August 2026.