106 research outputs found
Neural-Augmented Static Analysis of Android Communication
We address the problem of discovering communication links between
applications in the popular Android mobile operating system, an important
problem for security and privacy in Android. Any scalable static analysis in
this complex setting is bound to produce an excessive amount of
false-positives, rendering it impractical. To improve precision, we propose to
augment static analysis with a trained neural-network model that estimates the
probability that a communication link truly exists. We describe a
neural-network architecture that encodes abstractions of communicating objects
in two applications and estimates the probability with which a link indeed
exists. At the heart of our architecture are type-directed encoders (TDE), a
general framework for elegantly constructing encoders of a compound data type
by recursively composing encoders for its constituent types. We evaluate our
approach on a large corpus of Android applications, and demonstrate that it
achieves very high accuracy. Further, we conduct thorough interpretability
studies to understand the internals of the learned neural networks.Comment: Appears in Proceedings of the 2018 ACM Joint European Software
Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software
Engineering (ESEC/FSE
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