JSBiRTH: Dynamic javascript birthmark based on the run-time heap

JavaScript is currently the dominating client-side scripting language in the web community. However, the source code of JavaScript can be easily copied through a browser. The intellectual property right of the developers lacks protection. In this paper, we consider using dynamic software birthmark for JavaScript. Instead of using control flow trace (which can be corrupted by code obfuscation) and API (which may not work if the software does not have many API calls), we exploit the run-time heap, which reflects substantially the dynamic behavior of a program, to extract birthmarks. We introduce JSBiRTH, a novel software birthmark system for JavaScript based on the comparison of run-time heaps. We evaluated our system using 20 JavaScript programs with most of them being large-scale. Our system gave no false positive or false negative. Moreover, it is robust against code obfuscation attack. We also show that our system is effective in detecting partial code theft. © 2011 IEEE.published_or_final_versionThe 35th IEEE Annual Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC 2011), Munich, Germany, 18-22 July 2011. In Proceedings of 35th COMPSAC, 2011, p. 407-41

A privilege escalation vulnerability checking system for android applications

Android is a free, open source mobile platform based on the Linux kernel. The openness of the application platform attracts developers, both benign and malicious. Android depends on privilege separation to isolate applications from each other and from the system. However, a recent research reported that a genuine application exploited at runtime or a malicious application can escalate granted permissions. The attack depends on a carelessly designed application which fails to protect the permissions granted to it. In this research, we propose a vulnerability checking system to check if an application can be potentially leveraged by an attacker to launch such privilege escalation attack. We downloaded 1038 applications from the wild and found 217 potentially vulnerable applications that need further inspection.published_or_final_versionThe 13th IEEE International Conference on Communication Technology (ICCT 2011), Jinan, China, 25-28 September 2011. In Proceedings of 13th ICCT, 2011, p. 681-68

DroidChecker: analyzing Android applications for capability leak

While Apple has checked every app available on the App Store, Google takes another approach that allows anyone to publish apps on the Android Market. The openness of the Android Market attracts both benign and malicious developers. The security of the Android platform relies mainly on sandboxing applications and restricting their capabilities such that no application, by default, can perform any operations that would adversely impact other applications, the operating system, or the user. However, a recent research reported that a genuine but vulnerable application may leak its capabilities to other applications. When being leveraged, other applications can gain extra capabilities which they are not granted originally. We present DroidChecker, an Android application analyzing tool which searches for the aforementioned vulnerability in Android applications. Droid- Checker uses interprocedural control flow graph searching and static taint checking to detect exploitable data paths in an Android application. We analyzed more than 1100 Android applications using DroidChecker and found 6 previously unknown vulnerable applications including the renowned Adobe Photoshop Express application. We have also developed a malicious application that exploits the previously unknown vulnerability found in the Adobe Photoshop Express application. We show that the malicious application, which is not granted any permissions, can access contacts on the phone with just a few lines of code. Copyright 2012 ACM.link_to_OA_fulltex