ApkCombiner: Combining Multiple Android Apps to Support Inter-App Analysis

in International Conference on ICT Systems Security and Privacy Protection (SEC 2015) (2015, May)

Flattening or not of the combinatorial interaction testing models

in Eighth IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation, ICST 2015 Workshops (2015, April)

Are Your Training Datasets Yet Relevant? - An Investigation into the Importance of Timeline in Machine Learning-Based Malware Detection

in Engineering Secure Software and Systems - 7th International Symposium ESSoS 2015, Milan, Italy, March 4-6, 2015. Proceedings (2015)

In this paper, we consider the relevance of timeline in the construction of datasets, to highlight its impact on the performance of a machine learning-based malware detection scheme. Typically, we show ... [more ▼]

In this paper, we consider the relevance of timeline in the construction of datasets, to highlight its impact on the performance of a machine learning-based malware detection scheme. Typically, we show that simply picking a random set of known malware to train a malware detector, as it is done in many assessment scenarios from the literature, yields significantly biased results. In the process of assessing the extent of this impact through various experiments, we were also able to con- firm a number of intuitive assumptions about Android malware. For instance, we discuss the existence of Android malware lineages and how they could impact the performance of malware detection in the wild. [less ▲]

IccTA: Detecting Inter-Component Privacy Leaks in Android Apps

in 2015 IEEE/ACM 37th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2015) (2015)

Shake Them All is a popular "Wallpaper" application exceeding millions of downloads on Google Play. At installation, this application is given permission to (1) access the Internet (for updating ... [more ▼]

Shake Them All is a popular "Wallpaper" application exceeding millions of downloads on Google Play. At installation, this application is given permission to (1) access the Internet (for updating wallpapers) and (2) use the device microphone (to change background following noise changes). With these permissions, the application could silently record user conversations and upload them remotely. To give more confidence about how Shake Them All actually processes what it records, it is necessary to build a precise analysis tool that tracks the flow of any sensitive data from its source point to any sink, especially if those are in different components. Since Android applications may leak private data carelessly or maliciously, we propose IccTA, a static taint analyzer to detect privacy leaks among components in Android applications. IccTA goes beyond state-of-the-art approaches by supporting inter-component detection. By propagating context information among components, IccTA improves the precision of the analysis. IccTA outperforms existing tools on two benchmarks for ICC-leak detectors: DroidBench and ICC-Bench. Moreover, our approach detects 534 ICC leaks in 108 apps from MalGenome and 2,395 ICC leaks in 337 apps in a set of 15,000 Google Play apps. [less ▲]

An Investigation into the Use of Common Libraries in Android Apps

in arXiv preprint arXiv:1511.06554 (2015)

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 functionalities 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 ▲]

Similarity testing for access control

in Information and Software Technology (2015), 58

Context: Access control is among the most important security mechanisms, and XACML is the de facto standard for specifying, storing and deploying access control policies. Since it is critical that ... [more ▼]

Context: Access control is among the most important security mechanisms, and XACML is the de facto standard for specifying, storing and deploying access control policies. Since it is critical that enforced policies are correct, policy testing must be performed in an effective way to identify potential security flaws and bugs. In practice, exhaustive testing is impossible due to budget constraints. Therefore the tests need to be prioritized so that resources are focused on their most relevant subset. Objective: This paper tackles the issue of access control test prioritization. It proposes a new approach for access control test prioritization that relies on similarity. Method: The approach has been applied to several policies and the results have been compared to random prioritization (as a baseline). To assess the different prioritization criteria, we use mutation analysis and compute the mutation scores reached by each criterion. This helps assessing the rate of fault detection. Results: The empirical results indicate that our proposed approach is effective and its rate of fault detection is higher than that of random prioritization. Conclusion: We conclude that prioritization of access control test cases can be usefully based on similarity criteria. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. [less ▲]

Combining Multi-Objective Search and Constraint Solving for Configuring Large Software Product Lines

in 37th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2015) (2015)

Trivial Compiler Equivalence: A Large Scale Empirical Study of a Simple, Fast and Effective Equivalent Mutant Detection Technique

in 37th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2015) (2015)

Roundtable: Research Opportunities and Challenges for Emerging Software Systems

in Journal of Computer Science and Technology (2015), 30(5), 935-941

For this special section on software systems, several research leaders in software systems, as guest editors for this special section, discuss important issues that will shape this field’s future ... [more ▼]

For this special section on software systems, several research leaders in software systems, as guest editors for this special section, discuss important issues that will shape this field’s future directions. The essays included in this roundtable article cover research opportunities and challenges for emerging software systems such as data processing programs (Xiangyu Zhang) and online services (Dongmei Zhang), with new directions of technologies such as unifications in software testing (Yves Le Traon), data-driven and evidence-based software engineering (Qing Wang), and dynamic analysis of multiple traces (Lu Zhang). — Tao Xie, Leading Editor of Special Section on Software System. © 2015, Springer Science+Business Media New York. [less ▲]

Empirical assessment of machine learning-based malware detectors for Android: Measuring the Gap between In-the-Lab and In-the-Wild Validation Scenarios

in Empirical Software Engineering (2014)

To address the issue of malware detection through large sets of applications, researchers have recently started to investigate the capabilities of machine-learning techniques for proposing effective ... [more ▼]

To address the issue of malware detection through large sets of applications, researchers have recently started to investigate the capabilities of machine-learning techniques for proposing effective approaches. So far, several promising results were recorded in the literature, many approaches being assessed with what we call in the lab validation scenarios. This paper revisits the purpose of malware detection to discuss whether such in the lab validation scenarios provide reliable indications on the performance of malware detectors in real-world settings, aka in the wild. To this end, we have devised several Machine Learning classifiers that rely on a set of features built from applications’ CFGs. We use a sizeable dataset of over 50 000 Android applications collected from sources where state-of-the art approaches have selected their data. We show that, in the lab, our approach outperforms existing machine learning-based approaches. However, this high performance does not translate in high performance in the wild. The performance gap we observed—F-measures dropping from over 0.9 in the lab to below 0.1 in the wild —raises one important question: How do state-of-the-art approaches perform in the wild ? [less ▲]