Formal Analysis of Android's Permission-Based Security Model

In this work we present a comprehensive formal specification of an idealized formulation of Android?s permission model. Permissions in Android are basically tags that developers declare in their applications, more precisely in the so-called application manifest, to gain access to sensitive resources. Several analyses have recently been carried out concerning the security of the Android system. Few of them, however, pay attention to the formal aspects of the permission enforcing framework. We provide a complete and uniform formulation of several security properties using the higher order logic of the Calculus of Inductive Constructions and sketch the proofs that have been developed and verified using the Coq proof assistant. We also analyze how the changes introduced in the latest version of Android, that allows to manage permissions at runtime, impact the presented model

Machine-assisted Cyber Threat Analysis using Conceptual Knowledge Discovery

Over the last years, computer networks have evolved into highly dynamic and interconnected environments, involving multiple heterogeneous devices and providing a myriad of services on top of them. This complex landscape has made it extremely difficult for security administrators to keep accurate and be effective in protecting their systems against cyber threats. In this paper, we describe our vision and scientific posture on how artificial intelligence techniques and a smart use of security knowledge may assist system administrators in better defending their networks. To that end, we put forward a research roadmap involving three complimentary axes, namely, (I) the use of FCA-based mechanisms for managing configuration vulnerabilities, (II) the exploitation of knowledge representation techniques for automated security reasoning, and (III) the design of a cyber threat intelligence mechanism as a CKDD process. Then, we describe a machine-assisted process for cyber threat analysis which provides a holistic perspective of how these three research axes are integrated together