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

Identifying Bugs in Make and JVM-Oriented Builds

Incremental and parallel builds are crucial features of modern build systems. Parallelism enables fast builds by running independent tasks simultaneously, while incrementality saves time and computing resources by processing the build operations that were affected by a particular code change. Writing build definitions that lead to error-free incremental and parallel builds is a challenging task. This is mainly because developers are often unable to predict the effects of build operations on the file system and how different build operations interact with each other. Faulty build scripts may seriously degrade the reliability of automated builds, as they cause build failures, and non-deterministic and incorrect build results. To reason about arbitrary build executions, we present buildfs, a generally-applicable model that takes into account the specification (as declared in build scripts) and the actual behavior (low-level file system operation) of build operations. We then formally define different types of faults related to incremental and parallel builds in terms of the conditions under which a file system operation violates the specification of a build operation. Our testing approach, which relies on the proposed model, analyzes the execution of single full build, translates it into buildfs, and uncovers faults by checking for corresponding violations. We evaluate the effectiveness, efficiency, and applicability of our approach by examining hundreds of Make and Gradle projects. Notably, our method is the first to handle Java-oriented build systems. The results indicate that our approach is (1) able to uncover several important issues (245 issues found in 45 open-source projects have been confirmed and fixed by the upstream developers), and (2) orders of magnitude faster than a state-of-the-art tool for Make builds

Analysis and evaluation of SafeDroid v2.0, a framework for detecting malicious Android applications

Android smartphones have become a vital component of the daily routine of millions of people, running a plethora of applications available in the official and alternative marketplaces. Although there are many security mechanisms to scan and filter malicious applications, malware is still able to reach the devices of many end-users. In this paper, we introduce the SafeDroid v2.0 framework, that is a flexible, robust, and versatile open-source solution for statically analysing Android applications, based on machine learning techniques. The main goal of our work, besides the automated production of fully sufficient prediction and classification models in terms of maximum accuracy scores and minimum negative errors, is to offer an out-of-the-box framework that can be employed by the Android security researchers to efficiently experiment to find effective solutions: the SafeDroid v2.0 framework makes it possible to test many different combinations of machine learning classifiers, with a high degree of freedom and flexibility in the choice of features to consider, such as dataset balance and dataset selection. The framework also provides a server, for generating experiment reports, and an Android application, for the verification of the produced models in real-life scenarios. An extensive campaign of experiments is also presented to show how it is possible to efficiently find competitive solutions: the results of our experiments confirm that SafeDroid v2.0 can reach very good performances, even with highly unbalanced dataset inputs and always with a very limited overhead