2,168 research outputs found
JVM-hosted languages: They talk the talk, but do they walk the walk?
The rapid adoption of non-Java JVM languages is impressive: major international corporations are staking critical parts of their software infrastructure on components built from languages such as
Scala and Clojure. However with the possible exception of Scala,
there has been little academic consideration and characterization
of these languages to date. In this paper, we examine four nonJava JVM languages and use exploratory data analysis techniques
to investigate differences in their dynamic behavior compared to
Java. We analyse a variety of programs and levels of behavior to
draw distinctions between the different programming languages.
We briefly discuss the implications of our findings for improving
the performance of JIT compilation and garbage collection on the
JVM platform
Static Analysis for Extracting Permission Checks of a Large Scale Framework: The Challenges And Solutions for Analyzing Android
A common security architecture is based on the protection of certain
resources by permission checks (used e.g., in Android and Blackberry). It has
some limitations, for instance, when applications are granted more permissions
than they actually need, which facilitates all kinds of malicious usage (e.g.,
through code injection). The analysis of permission-based framework requires a
precise mapping between API methods of the framework and the permissions they
require. In this paper, we show that naive static analysis fails miserably when
applied with off-the-shelf components on the Android framework. We then present
an advanced class-hierarchy and field-sensitive set of analyses to extract this
mapping. Those static analyses are capable of analyzing the Android framework.
They use novel domain specific optimizations dedicated to Android.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (2014). arXiv admin note:
substantial text overlap with arXiv:1206.582
In-Vivo Bytecode Instrumentation for Improving Privacy on Android Smartphones in Uncertain Environments
In this paper we claim that an efficient and readily applicable means to
improve privacy of Android applications is: 1) to perform runtime monitoring by
instrumenting the application bytecode and 2) in-vivo, i.e. directly on the
smartphone. We present a tool chain to do this and present experimental results
showing that this tool chain can run on smartphones in a reasonable amount of
time and with a realistic effort. Our findings also identify challenges to be
addressed before running powerful runtime monitoring and instrumentations
directly on smartphones. We implemented two use-cases leveraging the tool
chain: BetterPermissions, a fine-grained user centric permission policy system
and AdRemover an advertisement remover. Both prototypes improve the privacy of
Android systems thanks to in-vivo bytecode instrumentation.Comment: ISBN: 978-2-87971-111-
Automatically Securing Permission-Based Software by Reducing the Attack Surface: An Application to Android
A common security architecture, called the permission-based security model
(used e.g. in Android and Blackberry), entails intrinsic risks. For instance,
applications can be granted more permissions than they actually need, what we
call a "permission gap". Malware can leverage the unused permissions for
achieving their malicious goals, for instance using code injection. In this
paper, we present an approach to detecting permission gaps using static
analysis. Our prototype implementation in the context of Android shows that the
static analysis must take into account a significant amount of
platform-specific knowledge. Using our tool on two datasets of Android
applications, we found out that a non negligible part of applications suffers
from permission gaps, i.e. does not use all the permissions they declare
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