753 research outputs found
Android Malware Detection with Unbiased Confidence Guarantees
The impressive growth of smartphone devices in combination with the rising
ubiquity of using mobile platforms for sensitive applications such as Internet
banking, have triggered a rapid increase in mobile malware. In recent
literature, many studies examine Machine Learning techniques, as the most
promising approach for mobile malware detection, without however quantifying
the uncertainty involved in their detections. In this paper, we address this
problem by proposing a machine learning dynamic analysis approach that provides
provably valid confidence guarantees in each malware detection. Moreover the
particular guarantees hold for both the malicious and benign classes
independently and are unaffected by any bias in the data. The proposed approach
is based on a novel machine learning framework, called Conformal Prediction,
combined with a random forests classifier. We examine its performance on a
large-scale dataset collected by installing 1866 malicious and 4816 benign
applications on a real android device. We make this collection of dynamic
analysis data available to the research community. The obtained experimental
results demonstrate the empirical validity, usefulness and unbiased nature of
the outputs produced by the proposed approach
Eight years of rider measurement in the Android malware ecosystem: evolution and lessons learned
Despite the growing threat posed by Android malware,
the research community is still lacking a comprehensive
view of common behaviors and trends exposed by malware families
active on the platform. Without such view, the researchers
incur the risk of developing systems that only detect outdated
threats, missing the most recent ones. In this paper, we conduct
the largest measurement of Android malware behavior to date,
analyzing over 1.2 million malware samples that belong to 1.2K
families over a period of eight years (from 2010 to 2017). We
aim at understanding how the behavior of Android malware
has evolved over time, focusing on repackaging malware. In
this type of threats different innocuous apps are piggybacked
with a malicious payload (rider), allowing inexpensive malware
manufacturing.
One of the main challenges posed when studying repackaged
malware is slicing the app to split benign components apart from
the malicious ones. To address this problem, we use differential
analysis to isolate software components that are irrelevant to the
campaign and study the behavior of malicious riders alone. Our
analysis framework relies on collective repositories and recent
advances on the systematization of intelligence extracted from
multiple anti-virus vendors. We find that since its infancy in
2010, the Android malware ecosystem has changed significantly,
both in the type of malicious activity performed by the malicious
samples and in the level of obfuscation used by malware to avoid
detection. We then show that our framework can aid analysts
who attempt to study unknown malware families. Finally, we
discuss what our findings mean for Android malware detection
research, highlighting areas that need further attention by the
research community.Accepted manuscrip
Mobile Malware Behaviour through Opcode Analysis
As the popularity of mobile devices are on the rise, millions of users are now exposed to mobile malware threats. Malware is known for its ability in causing damage to mobile devices. Attackers often use it as a way to use the resources available and for other cybercriminal benefits such stealing users’ data, credentials and credit card number. Various detection techniques have been introduced in mitigating mobile malware, yet the malware author has its own method to overcome the detection method. This paper presents mobile malware analysis approaches through opcode analysis. Opcode analysis on mobile malware reveals the behaviour of malicious application in the binary level. The comparison made between the numbers of opcode occurrence from a malicious application and benign shows a significance traits. These differences can be used in classifying the malicious and benign mobile application
Code transplantation for adversarial malware
In the nefarious fight against attackers, a wide range of smart algorithms have been introduced, in order to block and even prevent new families of malware before their appearance. Machine learning, for instance, recently gained a lot of attention thanks to its ability to use generalization to possibly detect never-before-seen attacks or variants of a known one. During the past years, a lot of works have tested the strength of machine learning in the cybersecurity field, exploring its potentialities and weaknesses. In particular, various studies highlighted its robustness against adversarial attacks, proposing strategies to mitigate them .
Unfortunately, all these findings have focused in testing their own discoveries just operating on the dataset at feature layer space, which is the virtual data representation space, without testing the current feasibility of the attack at the problem space level, modifying the current adversarial sample .
For this reason, in this dissertation, we will introduce PRISM, a framework for executing an adversarial attack operating at the problem space level. Even if this framework focuses only on Android applications, the whole methodology can be generalized on other platforms, like Windows, Mac or Linux executable files.
The main idea is to successfully evade a classifier by transplanting chunks of code, taken from a set of goodware to a given malware. Exactly as in medicine, we have a donor who donates organs and receivers who receive them, in this case, goodware applications are our donors, the organs are the needed code and the receiver is the targeted malware.
In the following work we will discuss about concepts related to a wide variety of topics, ranging from machine learning, due to the target classifier, to static analysis, due to the possible countermeasures considered, to program analysis, due to the extraction techniques adopter, ending in mobile application, because the target operating system is Android
CALIPER: Continuous Authentication Layered with Integrated PKI Encoding Recognition
Architectures relying on continuous authentication require a secure way to
challenge the user's identity without trusting that the Continuous
Authentication Subsystem (CAS) has not been compromised, i.e., that the
response to the layer which manages service/application access is not fake. In
this paper, we introduce the CALIPER protocol, in which a separate Continuous
Access Verification Entity (CAVE) directly challenges the user's identity in a
continuous authentication regime. Instead of simply returning authentication
probabilities or confidence scores, CALIPER's CAS uses live hard and soft
biometric samples from the user to extract a cryptographic private key embedded
in a challenge posed by the CAVE. The CAS then uses this key to sign a response
to the CAVE. CALIPER supports multiple modalities, key lengths, and security
levels and can be applied in two scenarios: One where the CAS must authenticate
its user to a CAVE running on a remote server (device-server) for access to
remote application data, and another where the CAS must authenticate its user
to a locally running trusted computing module (TCM) for access to local
application data (device-TCM). We further demonstrate that CALIPER can leverage
device hardware resources to enable privacy and security even when the device's
kernel is compromised, and we show how this authentication protocol can even be
expanded to obfuscate direct kernel object manipulation (DKOM) malwares.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 2016 Biometrics Worksho
A Novel Traffic Based Framework for Smartphone Security Analysis
Android Operating system (OS) has grown into the most predominant smartphone platform due to its flexibility and open source characteristics. Because of its openness, it has become prone to numerous attackers and malware designers who are constantly trying to elicit confidential information by articulating a plethora of attacks through these designed malwares. Detection of these malwares to protect the smartphone is the core function of the smartphone security analysis. This paper proposes a novel traffic-based framework that exploits the network traffic features to detect these malwares. Here, a unified feature (UF) is created by graph-based cross-diffusion of generated order and sparse matrices corresponding to the network traffic features. Generated unified feature is then given to three classifiers to get corresponding classifier scores. The robustness of the suggested framework when evaluated on the standard datasets outperforms contemporary techniques to achieve an average accuracy of 98.74 per cent
Trustworthy Wireless Personal Area Networks
In the Internet of Things (IoT), everyday objects are equipped with the ability to compute and communicate. These smart things have invaded the lives of everyday people, being constantly carried or worn on our bodies, and entering into our homes, our healthcare, and beyond. This has given rise to wireless networks of smart, connected, always-on, personal things that are constantly around us, and have unfettered access to our most personal data as well as all of the other devices that we own and encounter throughout our day. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that our personal devices and data are frequent targets of ever-present threats. Securing these devices and networks, however, is challenging. In this dissertation, we outline three critical problems in the context of Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs) and present our solutions to these problems.
First, I present our Trusted I/O solution (BASTION-SGX) for protecting sensitive user data transferred between wirelessly connected (Bluetooth) devices. This work shows how in-transit data can be protected from privileged threats, such as a compromised OS, on commodity systems. I present insights into the Bluetooth architecture, Intel’s Software Guard Extensions (SGX), and how a Trusted I/O solution can be engineered on commodity devices equipped with SGX.
Second, I present our work on AMULET and how we successfully built a wearable health hub that can run multiple health applications, provide strong security properties, and operate on a single charge for weeks or even months at a time. I present the design and evaluation of our highly efficient event-driven programming model, the design of our low-power operating system, and developer tools for profiling ultra-low-power applications at compile time.
Third, I present a new approach (VIA) that helps devices at the center of WPANs (e.g., smartphones) to verify the authenticity of interactions with other devices. This work builds on past work in anomaly detection techniques and shows how these techniques can be applied to Bluetooth network traffic. Specifically, we show how to create normality models based on fine- and course-grained insights from network traffic, which can be used to verify the authenticity of future interactions
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