An Investigation into the Use of Common Libraries in Android Apps

in The 23rd IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering (SANER 2016) (2016, March)

The packaging model of Android apps requires the entire code necessary for the execution of an app to be shipped into one single apk file. Thus, an analysis of Android apps often visits code which is not ... [more ▼]

The packaging model of Android apps requires the entire code necessary for the execution of an app to be shipped into one single apk file. Thus, an analysis of Android apps often visits code which is not part of the functionality delivered by the app. Such code is often contributed by the common libraries which are used pervasively by all apps. Unfortunately, Android analyses, e.g., for piggybacking detection and malware detection, can produce inaccurate results if they do not take into account the case of library code, which constitute noise in app features. Despite some efforts on investigating Android libraries, the momentum of Android research has not yet produced a complete set of common libraries to further support in-depth analysis of Android apps. In this paper, we leverage a dataset of about 1.5 million apps from Google Play to harvest potential common libraries, including advertisement libraries. With several steps of refinements, we finally collect by far the largest set of 1,113 libraries supporting common functionality and 240 libraries for advertisement. We use the dataset to investigates several aspects of Android libraries, including their popularity and their proportion in Android app code. Based on these datasets, we have further performed several empirical investigations to confirm the motivations behind our work. [less ▲]

Profiling household appliance electricity usage with n-gram language modeling

in The 2016 IEEE International Conference on Industrial Technology (ICIT 2016) (2016, March)

On the Lack of Consensus in Anti-Virus Decisions: Metrics and Insights on Building Ground Truths of Android Malware

in Detection of Intrusions and Malware, and Vulnerability Assessment - 13th International Conference (2016)

There is generally a lack of consensus in Antivirus (AV) engines' decisions on a given sample. This challenges the building of authoritative ground-truth datasets. Instead, researchers and practitioners ... [more ▼]

There is generally a lack of consensus in Antivirus (AV) engines' decisions on a given sample. This challenges the building of authoritative ground-truth datasets. Instead, researchers and practitioners may rely on unvalidated approaches to build their ground truth, e.g., by considering decisions from a selected set of Antivirus vendors or by setting up a threshold number of positive detections before classifying a sample. Both approaches are biased as they implicitly either decide on ranking AV products, or they consider that all AV decisions have equal weights. In this paper, we extensively investigate the lack of agreement among AV engines. To that end, we propose a set of metrics that quantitatively describe the different dimensions of this lack of consensus. We show how our metrics can bring important insights by using the detection results of 66 AV products on 2 million Android apps as a case study. Our analysis focuses not only on AV binary decision but also on the notoriously hard problem of labels that AVs associate with suspicious files, and allows to highlight biases hidden in the collection of a malware ground truth---a foundation stone of any machine learning-based malware detection approach. [less ▲]

Feature Location Benchmark for Software Families using Eclipse Community Releases

in Software Reuse: Bridging with Social-Awareness, ICSR 2016 Proceedings (2016)

Suspicious Electric Consumption Detection Based on Multi-Profiling Using Live Machine Learning

in 2015 IEEE International Conference on Smart Grid Communications (SmartGridComm) (2015, November)

The transition from today’s electricity grid to the so-called smart grid relies heavily on the usage of modern information and communication technology to enable advanced features like two-way ... [more ▼]

The transition from today’s electricity grid to the so-called smart grid relies heavily on the usage of modern information and communication technology to enable advanced features like two-way communication, an automated control of devices, and automated meter reading. The digital backbone of the smart grid opens the door for advanced collecting, monitoring, and processing of customers’ energy consumption data. One promising approach is the automatic detection of suspicious consumption values, e.g., due to physically or digitally manipulated data or damaged devices. However, detecting suspicious values in the amount of meter data is challenging, especially because electric consumption heavily depends on the context. For instance, a customers energy consumption profile may change during vacation or weekends compared to normal working days. In this paper we present an advanced software monitoring and alerting system for suspicious consumption value detection based on live machine learning techniques. Our proposed system continuously learns context-dependent consumption profiles of customers, e.g., daily, weekly, and monthly profiles, classifies them and selects the most appropriate one according to the context, like date and weather. By learning not just one but several profiles per customer and in addition taking context parameters into account, our approach can minimize false alerts (low false positive rate). We evaluate our approach in terms of performance (live detection) and accuracy based on a data set from our partner, Creos Luxembourg S.A., the electricity grid operator in Luxembourg. [less ▲]

An Extensive Systematic Review on the Model-Driven Development of Secure Systems

in Information and Software Technology (2015), 68(December 2015), 62-81

Context: Model-Driven Security (MDS) is as a specialised Model-Driven Engineering research area for supporting the development of secure systems. Over a decade of research on MDS has resulted in a large ... [more ▼]

Context: Model-Driven Security (MDS) is as a specialised Model-Driven Engineering research area for supporting the development of secure systems. Over a decade of research on MDS has resulted in a large number of publications. Objective: To provide a detailed analysis of the state of the art in MDS, a systematic literature review (SLR) is essential. Method: We conducted an extensive SLR on MDS. Derived from our research questions, we designed a rigorous, extensive search and selection process to identify a set of primary MDS studies that is as complete as possible. Our three-pronged search process consists of automatic searching, manual searching, and snowballing. After discovering and considering more than thousand relevant papers, we identified, strictly selected, and reviewed 108 MDS publications. Results: The results of our SLR show the overall status of the key artefacts of MDS, and the identified primary MDS studies. E.g. regarding security modelling artefact, we found that developing domain-specific languages plays a key role in many MDS approaches. The current limitations in each MDS artefact are pointed out and corresponding potential research directions are suggested. Moreover, we categorise the identified primary MDS studies into 5 significant MDS studies, and other emerging or less common MDS studies. Finally, some trend analyses of MDS research are given. Conclusion: Our results suggest the need for addressing multiple security concerns more systematically and simultaneously, for tool chains supporting the MDS development cycle, and for more empirical studies on the application of MDS methodologies. To the best of our knowledge, this SLR is the first in the field of Software Engineering that combines a snowballing strategy with database searching. This combination has delivered an extensive literature study on MDS. [less ▲]

Stream my Models: Reactive Peer-to-Peer Distributed Models@run.time

in Lethbridge, Timothy; Cabot, Jordi; Egyed, Alexander (Eds.) 2015 ACM/IEEE 18th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS) (2015, September)

The models@run.time paradigm promotes the use of models during the execution of cyber-physical systems to represent their context and to reason about their runtime behaviour. However, current modeling ... [more ▼]

The models@run.time paradigm promotes the use of models during the execution of cyber-physical systems to represent their context and to reason about their runtime behaviour. However, current modeling techniques do not allow to cope at the same time with the large-scale, distributed, and constantly changing nature of these systems. In this paper, we introduce a distributed models@run.time approach, combining ideas from reactive programming, peer-to-peer distribution, and large-scale models@run.time. We define distributed models as observable streams of chunks that are exchanged between nodes in a peer-to-peer manner. lazy loading strategy allows to transparently access the complete virtual model from every node, although chunks are actually distributed across nodes. Observers and automatic reloading of chunks enable a reactive programming style. We integrated our approach into the Kevoree Modeling Framework and demonstrate that it enables frequently changing, reactive distributed models that can scale to millions of elements and several thousand nodes. [less ▲]

A Study of Potential Component Leaks in Android Apps

Report (2015)

We discuss the capability of a new feature set for malware detection based on potential component leaks (PCLs). PCLs are defined as sensitive data-flows that involve Android inter-component communications ... [more ▼]

We discuss the capability of a new feature set for malware detection based on potential component leaks (PCLs). PCLs are defined as sensitive data-flows that involve Android inter-component communications. We show that PCLs are common in Android apps and that malicious applications indeed manipulate significantly more PCLs than benign apps. Then, we evaluate a machine learning-based approach relying on PCLs. Experimental validation show high performance with 95% precision for identifying malware, demonstrating that PCLs can be used for discriminating malicious apps from benign apps. By further investigating the generalization ability of this feature set, we highlight an issue often overlooked in the Android malware detection community: Qualitative aspects of training datasets have a strong impact on a malware detector’s performance. Furthermore, this impact cannot be overcome by simply increasing the Quantity of training material. [less ▲]

Adaptive Blurring of Sensor Data to balance Privacy and Utility for Ubiquitous Services

in The 30th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (2015, April)

Given the trend towards mobile computing, the next generation of ubiquitous “smart” services will have to continuously analyze surrounding sensor data. More than ever, such services will rely on data ... [more ▼]

Given the trend towards mobile computing, the next generation of ubiquitous “smart” services will have to continuously analyze surrounding sensor data. More than ever, such services will rely on data potentially related to personal activities to perform their tasks, e.g. to predict urban traffic or local weather conditions. However, revealing personal data inevitably entails privacy risks, especially when data is shared with high precision and frequency. For example, by analyzing the precise electric consumption data, it can be inferred if a person is currently at home, however this can empower new services such as a smart heating system. Access control (forbid or grant access) or anonymization techniques are not able to deal with such trade-off because whether they completely prohibit access to data or lose source traceability. Blurring techniques, by tuning data quality, offer a wide range of trade-offs between privacy and utility for services. However, the amount of ubiquitous services and their data quality requirements lead to an explosion of possible configurations of blurring algorithms. To manage this complexity, in this paper we propose a platform that automatically adapts (at runtime) blurring components between data owners and data consumers (services). The platform searches the optimal trade-off between service utility and privacy risks using multi-objective evolutionary algorithms to adapt the underlying communication platform. We evaluate our approach on a sensor network gateway and show its suitability in terms of i) effectiveness to find an appropriate solution, ii) efficiency and scalability. [less ▲]

Polymer: A Model-Driven Approach for Simpler, Safer, and Evolutive Multi-Objective Optimization Development

in Hammoudi, Slimane; Pires, Luis Ferreira; Desfray, Philippe (Eds.) et al MODELSWARD 2015 - Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development (2015, February)

Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms (MOEAs) have been successfully used to optimize various domains such as finance, science, engineering, logistics and software engineering. Nevertheless, MOEAs are ... [more ▼]

Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms (MOEAs) have been successfully used to optimize various domains such as finance, science, engineering, logistics and software engineering. Nevertheless, MOEAs are still very complex to apply and require detailed knowledge about problem encoding and mutation operators to obtain an effective implementation. Software engineering paradigms such as domain-driven design aim to tackle this complexity by allowing domain experts to focus on domain logic over technical details. Similarly, in order to handle MOEA complexity, we propose an approach, using model-driven software engineering (MDE) techniques, to define fitness functions and mutation operators without MOEA encoding knowledge. Integrated into an open source modelling framework, our approach can significantly simplify development and maintenance of multi-objective optimizations. By leveraging modeling methods, our approach allows reusable optimizations and seamlessly connects MOEA and MDE paradigms. We evaluate our approach on a cloud case study and show its suitability in terms of i) complexity to implement an MOO problem, ii) complexity to adapt (maintain) this implementation caused by changes in the domain model and/or optimization goals, and iii) show that the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach remains comparable to ad-hoc implementations. [less ▲]