1,591 research outputs found
I know what leaked in your pocket: uncovering privacy leaks on Android Apps with Static Taint Analysis
Android applications may leak privacy data carelessly or maliciously. In this
work we perform inter-component data-flow analysis to detect privacy leaks
between components of Android applications. Unlike all current approaches, our
tool, called IccTA, propagates the context between the components, which
improves the precision of the analysis. IccTA outperforms all other available
tools by reaching a precision of 95.0% and a recall of 82.6% on DroidBench. Our
approach detects 147 inter-component based privacy leaks in 14 applications in
a set of 3000 real-world applications with a precision of 88.4%. With the help
of ApkCombiner, our approach is able to detect inter-app based privacy leaks
ReCon: Revealing and Controlling PII Leaks in Mobile Network Traffic
It is well known that apps running on mobile devices extensively track and
leak users' personally identifiable information (PII); however, these users
have little visibility into PII leaked through the network traffic generated by
their devices, and have poor control over how, when and where that traffic is
sent and handled by third parties. In this paper, we present the design,
implementation, and evaluation of ReCon: a cross-platform system that reveals
PII leaks and gives users control over them without requiring any special
privileges or custom OSes. ReCon leverages machine learning to reveal potential
PII leaks by inspecting network traffic, and provides a visualization tool to
empower users with the ability to control these leaks via blocking or
substitution of PII. We evaluate ReCon's effectiveness with measurements from
controlled experiments using leaks from the 100 most popular iOS, Android, and
Windows Phone apps, and via an IRB-approved user study with 92 participants. We
show that ReCon is accurate, efficient, and identifies a wider range of PII
than previous approaches.Comment: Please use MobiSys version when referencing this work:
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2906392. 18 pages, recon.meddle.mob
MobileAppScrutinator: A Simple yet Efficient Dynamic Analysis Approach for Detecting Privacy Leaks across Mobile OSs
Smartphones, the devices we carry everywhere with us, are being heavily
tracked and have undoubtedly become a major threat to our privacy. As "tracking
the trackers" has become a necessity, various static and dynamic analysis tools
have been developed in the past. However, today, we still lack suitable tools
to detect, measure and compare the ongoing tracking across mobile OSs. To this
end, we propose MobileAppScrutinator, based on a simple yet efficient dynamic
analysis approach, that works on both Android and iOS (the two most popular OSs
today). To demonstrate the current trend in tracking, we select 140 most
representative Apps available on both Android and iOS AppStores and test them
with MobileAppScrutinator. In fact, choosing the same set of apps on both
Android and iOS also enables us to compare the ongoing tracking on these two
OSs. Finally, we also discuss the effectiveness of privacy safeguards available
on Android and iOS. We show that neither Android nor iOS privacy safeguards in
their present state are completely satisfying
A Multi-view Context-aware Approach to Android Malware Detection and Malicious Code Localization
Existing Android malware detection approaches use a variety of features such
as security sensitive APIs, system calls, control-flow structures and
information flows in conjunction with Machine Learning classifiers to achieve
accurate detection. Each of these feature sets provides a unique semantic
perspective (or view) of apps' behaviours with inherent strengths and
limitations. Meaning, some views are more amenable to detect certain attacks
but may not be suitable to characterise several other attacks. Most of the
existing malware detection approaches use only one (or a selected few) of the
aforementioned feature sets which prevent them from detecting a vast majority
of attacks. Addressing this limitation, we propose MKLDroid, a unified
framework that systematically integrates multiple views of apps for performing
comprehensive malware detection and malicious code localisation. The rationale
is that, while a malware app can disguise itself in some views, disguising in
every view while maintaining malicious intent will be much harder.
MKLDroid uses a graph kernel to capture structural and contextual information
from apps' dependency graphs and identify malice code patterns in each view.
Subsequently, it employs Multiple Kernel Learning (MKL) to find a weighted
combination of the views which yields the best detection accuracy. Besides
multi-view learning, MKLDroid's unique and salient trait is its ability to
locate fine-grained malice code portions in dependency graphs (e.g.,
methods/classes). Through our large-scale experiments on several datasets
(incl. wild apps), we demonstrate that MKLDroid outperforms three
state-of-the-art techniques consistently, in terms of accuracy while
maintaining comparable efficiency. In our malicious code localisation
experiments on a dataset of repackaged malware, MKLDroid was able to identify
all the malice classes with 94% average recall
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