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

Artificial intelligence in the cyber domain: Offense and defense

Artificial intelligence techniques have grown rapidly in recent years, and their applications in practice can be seen in many fields, ranging from facial recognition to image analysis. In the cybersecurity domain, AI-based techniques can provide better cyber defense tools and help adversaries improve methods of attack. However, malicious actors are aware of the new prospects too and will probably attempt to use them for nefarious purposes. This survey paper aims at providing an overview of how artificial intelligence can be used in the context of cybersecurity in both offense and defense.Web of Science123art. no. 41

User Review-Based Change File Localization for Mobile Applications

In the current mobile app development, novel and emerging DevOps practices (e.g., Continuous Delivery, Integration, and user feedback analysis) and tools are becoming more widespread. For instance, the integration of user feedback (provided in the form of user reviews) in the software release cycle represents a valuable asset for the maintenance and evolution of mobile apps. To fully make use of these assets, it is highly desirable for developers to establish semantic links between the user reviews and the software artefacts to be changed (e.g., source code and documentation), and thus to localize the potential files to change for addressing the user feedback. In this paper, we propose RISING (Review Integration via claSsification, clusterIng, and linkiNG), an automated approach to support the continuous integration of user feedback via classification, clustering, and linking of user reviews. RISING leverages domain-specific constraint information and semi-supervised learning to group user reviews into multiple fine-grained clusters concerning similar users' requests. Then, by combining the textual information from both commit messages and source code, it automatically localizes potential change files to accommodate the users' requests. Our empirical studies demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline work in terms of clustering and localization accuracy, and thus produces more reliable results.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures, 8 table

Private Model Compression via Knowledge Distillation

The soaring demand for intelligent mobile applications calls for deploying powerful deep neural networks (DNNs) on mobile devices. However, the outstanding performance of DNNs notoriously relies on increasingly complex models, which in turn is associated with an increase in computational expense far surpassing mobile devices' capacity. What is worse, app service providers need to collect and utilize a large volume of users' data, which contain sensitive information, to build the sophisticated DNN models. Directly deploying these models on public mobile devices presents prohibitive privacy risk. To benefit from the on-device deep learning without the capacity and privacy concerns, we design a private model compression framework RONA. Following the knowledge distillation paradigm, we jointly use hint learning, distillation learning, and self learning to train a compact and fast neural network. The knowledge distilled from the cumbersome model is adaptively bounded and carefully perturbed to enforce differential privacy. We further propose an elegant query sample selection method to reduce the number of queries and control the privacy loss. A series of empirical evaluations as well as the implementation on an Android mobile device show that RONA can not only compress cumbersome models efficiently but also provide a strong privacy guarantee. For example, on SVHN, when a meaningful $(9.83,10^{-6})$-differential privacy is guaranteed, the compact model trained by RONA can obtain 20$\times$ compression ratio and 19$\times$ speed-up with merely 0.97% accuracy loss.Comment: Conference version accepted by AAAI'1

Fog Computing in Medical Internet-of-Things: Architecture, Implementation, and Applications

In the era when the market segment of Internet of Things (IoT) tops the chart in various business reports, it is apparently envisioned that the field of medicine expects to gain a large benefit from the explosion of wearables and internet-connected sensors that surround us to acquire and communicate unprecedented data on symptoms, medication, food intake, and daily-life activities impacting one's health and wellness. However, IoT-driven healthcare would have to overcome many barriers, such as: 1) There is an increasing demand for data storage on cloud servers where the analysis of the medical big data becomes increasingly complex, 2) The data, when communicated, are vulnerable to security and privacy issues, 3) The communication of the continuously collected data is not only costly but also energy hungry, 4) Operating and maintaining the sensors directly from the cloud servers are non-trial tasks. This book chapter defined Fog Computing in the context of medical IoT. Conceptually, Fog Computing is a service-oriented intermediate layer in IoT, providing the interfaces between the sensors and cloud servers for facilitating connectivity, data transfer, and queryable local database. The centerpiece of Fog computing is a low-power, intelligent, wireless, embedded computing node that carries out signal conditioning and data analytics on raw data collected from wearables or other medical sensors and offers efficient means to serve telehealth interventions. We implemented and tested an fog computing system using the Intel Edison and Raspberry Pi that allows acquisition, computing, storage and communication of the various medical data such as pathological speech data of individuals with speech disorders, Phonocardiogram (PCG) signal for heart rate estimation, and Electrocardiogram (ECG)-based Q, R, S detection.Comment: 29 pages, 30 figures, 5 tables. Keywords: Big Data, Body Area Network, Body Sensor Network, Edge Computing, Fog Computing, Medical Cyberphysical Systems, Medical Internet-of-Things, Telecare, Tele-treatment, Wearable Devices, Chapter in Handbook of Large-Scale Distributed Computing in Smart Healthcare (2017), Springe