Preface (Special section on software systems 2020)

in Journal of Computer Science and Technology (2020), 35(6), 1231-1233

On Locating Malicious Code in Piggybacked Android Apps

in Journal of Computer Science and Technology (2017)

To devise efficient approaches and tools for detecting malicious packages in the Android ecosystem, researchers are increasingly required to have a deep understanding of malware. There is thus a need to ... [more ▼]

To devise efficient approaches and tools for detecting malicious packages in the Android ecosystem, researchers are increasingly required to have a deep understanding of malware. There is thus a need to provide a framework for dissecting malware and locating malicious program fragments within app code in order to build a comprehensive dataset of malicious samples. Towards addressing this need, we propose in this work a tool-based approach called HookRanker, which provides ranked lists of potentially malicious packages based on the way malware behaviour code is triggered. With experiments on a ground truth of piggybacked apps, we are able to automatically locate the malicious packages from piggybacked Android apps with an accuracy@5 of 83.6% for such packages that are triggered through method invocations and an accuracy@5 of 82.2% for such packages that are triggered independently. [less ▲]