Information Security Commons^™

A Comprehensive Analysis Of Evolving Permission Usage In Android Apps: Trends, Threats, And Ecosystem Insights, Ali Alkinoon, Trung Cuong Dang, Ahod Alghuried, Abdulaziz Alghamdi, Soohyeon Choi, Manar Mohaisen, An Wang, Saeed Salem, David Mohaisen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The proper use of Android app permissions is crucial to the success and security of these apps. Users must agree to permission requests when installing or running their apps. Despite official Android platform documentation on proper permission usage, there are still many cases of permission abuse. This study provides a comprehensive analysis of the Android permission landscape, highlighting trends and patterns in permission requests across various applications from the Google Play Store. By distinguishing between benign and malicious applications, we uncover developers’ evolving strategies, with malicious apps increasingly requesting fewer permissions to evade detection, while benign apps request more to …

Understanding The Bad Development Practices Of Android Custom Permissions In The Wild, Xiaohan Zhang, Zhiyuan Yu, Xinghua Li, Cen Zhang, Cong Sun, Ning Zhang, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Android system provides application developers with the ability to define custom permissions, which serve to moderate the sharing of resources and interactions with other applications. However, poor development practices of developers can render the permission mechanism ineffective, weakening the system protection. This paper presents a comprehensive examination of the problematic practices surrounding custom permissions employed by developers, referred to as Bad Practices of Custom Permissions (BPCP issues). To accomplish this, we conducted an empirical study and identified nine common BPCP issue patterns that can lead to various adverse consequences, such as installation failures, crashes, or even component hijacking. To automatically …

Using Machine Learning To Detect Vault (Anti-Forensic) Apps, Michael N. Johnstone, Wencheng Yang, Mohiuddin Ahmed

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Content hiding, or vault applications (apps), are designed with a secondary, often concealed purpose, such as encrypting and storing files. While these apps may serve legitimate functions, they unequivocally present significant challenges for law enforcement. Conventional methods for tackling this issue, whether static or dynamic, prove inadequate when devices—typically smartphones—cannot be modified. Additionally, these methods frequently require prior knowledge of which apps are classified as vault apps. This research decisively demonstrates that a non-invasive method of app analysis, combined with machine learning, can effectively identify vault apps. Our findings reveal that it is entirely possible to detect an Android vault …

Meta-Learning For Multi-Family Android Malware Classification, Yao Li, Dawei Yuan, Tao Zhang, Haipeng Cai, David Lo, Cuiyun Gao, Xiapu Luo, He Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the emergence of smartphones, Android has become a widely used mobile operating system. However, it is vulnerable when encountering various types of attacks. Every day, new malware threatens the security of users' devices and private data. Many methods have been proposed to classify malicious applications, utilizing static or dynamic analysis for classification. However, previous methods still suffer from unsatisfactory performance due to two challenges. First, they are unable to address the imbalanced data distribution problem, leading to poor performance for malware families with few members. Second, they are unable to address the zero-day malware (zero-day malware refers to malicious …

Cyclegan-Gradient Penalty For Enhancing Android Adversarial Malware Detection In Gray Box Setting, Fabrice Setephin Atedjio, Jean-Pierre Lienou, Frederica F. Nelson, Sachin S. Shetty, Charles A. Kamhoua

VMASC Publications

Adversarial attacks pose significant threats to Android malware detection by undermining the effectiveness of machine learning-based systems. The rapid increase in Android apps complicates the management of malicious software that can compromise user defense solutions. Many current Android defense techniques rely on deep learning methods. Malicious users exploit GAN-based attacks to achieve adversarial attack transferability and deceive target models by crafting adversarial examples based on known models. We propose a new model based on a Cycle Generative Adversarial Network (CycleGAN) to detect GAN-based attacks. This model incorporates a gradient penalty to enhance the detection rate of the target model. Our …

Experimental Comparison Of Features, Analyses, And Classifiers For Android Malware Detection, Lwin Khin Shar, Biniam Fisseha Demissie, Mariano Ceccato, Naing Tun Yan, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang, Christoph Bienert

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Android malware detection has been an active area of research. In the past decade, several machine learning-based approaches based on different types of features that may characterize Android malware behaviors have been proposed. The usually-analyzed features include API usages and sequences at various abstraction levels (e.g., class and package), extracted using static or dynamic analysis. Additionally, features that characterize permission uses, native API calls and reflection have also been analyzed. Initial works used conventional classifiers such as Random Forest to learn on those features. In recent years, deep learning-based classifiers such as Recurrent Neural Network have been explored. Considering various …

Performing Memory Forensics For Object Recovery From Android Application Memory, Sneha Sudhakaran

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The analysis of application-specific behavior has become an increasingly important technique in cyber forensics and incident response. The ability to determine the precise actions taken by a user can be the difference between a successful analysis and one that fails to meet its goals. The precise actions includes URLs visited, files downloaded, messages sent and received, images viewed, and data accessed. Evidence extraction from application memory at runtime is an effective solution to successfully extract valuable objects allocated by each application, and it is evident that there is a need for more Android forensics analysis tools that support recovering evidence …

Looking Back! Using Early Versions Of Android Apps As Attack Vectors, Yue Zhang, Jian Weng, Jia-Si Wneg, Lin Hou, Anjia Yang, Ming Li, Yang Xiang, Deng, Robert H.

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Android platform is gaining explosive popularity. This leads developers to invest resources to maintain the upward trajectory of the demand. Unfortunately, as the profit potential grows higher, the chances of these Apps getting attacked also get higher. Therefore, developers improved the security of their Apps, which limits attackers ability to compromise upgraded versions of the Apps. However, developers cannot enhance the security of earlier versions that have been released on the Play Store. The earlier versions of the App can be subject to reverse engineering and other attacks. In this paper, we find that attackers can use these earlier versions …

Advanced Security Analysis For Emergent Software Platforms, Mohannad Alhanahnah

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Emergent software ecosystems, boomed by the advent of smartphones and the Internet of Things (IoT) platforms, are perpetually sophisticated, deployed into highly dynamic environments, and facilitating interactions across heterogeneous domains. Accordingly, assessing the security thereof is a pressing need, yet requires high levels of scalability and reliability to handle the dynamism involved in such volatile ecosystems.

This dissertation seeks to enhance conventional security detection methods to cope with the emergent features of contemporary software ecosystems. In particular, it analyzes the security of Android and IoT ecosystems by developing rigorous vulnerability detection methods. A critical aspect of this work is the …

Assured Android Execution Environments, Brandon P. Froberg

Theses and Dissertations

Current cybersecurity best practices, techniques, tactics and procedures are insufficient to ensure the protection of Android systems. Software tools leveraging formal methods use mathematical means to assure both a design and implementation for a system and these methods can be used to provide security assurances. The goal of this research is to determine methods of assuring isolation when executing Android software in a contained environment. Specifically, this research demonstrates security properties relevant to Android software containers can be formally captured and validated, and that an implementation can be formally verified to satisfy a corresponding specification. A three-stage methodology called "The …

Security Vulnerabilities In Android Applications, Crischell Montealegre, Charles Rubia Njuguna, Muhammad Imran Malik, Peter Hannay, Ian Noel Mcateer

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Privacy-related vulnerabilities and risks are often embedded into applications during their development, with this action being either performed out of malice or out of negligence. Moreover, the majority of the mobile applications initiate connections to websites, other apps, or services outside of its scope causing significant compromise to the oblivious user. Therefore, mobile data encryption or related data-protection controls should be taken into account during the application development phase. This paper evaluates some standard apps and their associated threats using publicly available tools and demonstrates how an ignorant user or an organisation can fall prey to such apps.

Mitigating Man-In-The-Middle Attacks On Mobile Devices By Blocking Insecure Http Traffic Without Using Vpn, Kevin Chong, Muhammad Imran Malik, Peter Hannay

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Mobile devices are constantly connected to the Internet, making countless connections with remote services. Unfortunately, many of these connections are in cleartext, visible to third-parties while in transit. This is insecure and opens up the possibility for man-in-the-middle attacks. While there is little control over what kind of connection running apps can make, this paper presents a solution in blocking insecure HTTP packets from leaving the device. Specifically, the proposed solution works on the device, without the need to tunnel packets to a remote VPN server, and without special privileges such as root access. Speed tests were performed to quantify …

Tinyvisor: An Extensible Secure Framework On Android Platforms, Dong Shen, Zhoujun Li, Xiaojing Su, Jinxin Ma, Deng, Robert H.

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As the utilization of mobile platform keeps growing, the security issue of mobile platform becomes a serious threat to user privacy. The current security measures mainly focus on the application level and the framework level, with little protection on the kernel. Virtualization technologies have been used in x86 platforms to protect the security of the kernel. With a higher privilege than the guest operating system, the hypervisor can effectively detect and defend against the malicious activity inside the guest kernel. In this paper, we build a hypervisor framework called TinyVisor leveraging the ARM virtualization extensions to protect the guest system …

If I Had A Million Cryptos: Cryptowallet Application Analysis And A Trojan Proof-Of-Concept, Trevor Haigh, Frank Breitinger, Ibrahim Baggili

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Cryptocurrencies have gained wide adoption by enthusiasts and investors. In this work, we examine seven different Android cryptowallet applications for forensic artifacts, but we also assess their security against tampering and reverse engineering. Some of the biggest benefits of cryptocurrency is its security and relative anonymity. For this reason it is vital that wallet applications share the same properties. Our work, however, indicates that this is not the case. Five of the seven applications we tested do not implement basic security measures against reverse engineering. Three of the applications stored sensitive information, like wallet private keys, insecurely and one was …

Breaking Into The Vault: Privacy, Security And Forensic Analysis Of Android Vault Applications, Xiaolu Zhang, Ibrahim Baggili, Frank Breitinger

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

In this work we share the first account for the forensic analysis, security and privacy of Android vault applications. Vaults are designed to be privacy enhancing as they allow users to hide personal data but may also be misused to hide incriminating files. Our work has already helped law enforcement in the state of Connecticut to reconstruct 66 incriminating images and 18 videos in a single criminal case. We present case studies and results from analyzing 18 Android vault applications (accounting for nearly 220 million downloads from the Google Play store) by reverse engineering them and examining the forensic artifacts …

On The Effectiveness Of Virtualization Based Memory Isolation On Multicore Platforms, Siqi Zhao, Xuhua Ding

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Virtualization based memory isolation has beenwidely used as a security primitive in many security systems.This paper firstly provides an in-depth analysis of itseffectiveness in the multicore setting; a first in the literature.Our study reveals that memory isolation by itself is inadequatefor security. Due to the fundamental design choices inhardware, it faces several challenging issues including pagetable maintenance, address mapping validation and threadidentification. As demonstrated by our attacks implementedon XMHF and BitVisor, these issues undermine the security ofmemory isolation. Next, we propose a new isolation approachthat is immune to the aforementioned problems. In our design,the hypervisor constructs a fully isolated micro …

H-Binder: A Hardened Binder Framework On Android Systems, Dong Shen, Zhangkai Zhang, Xuhua Ding, Zhoujun Li, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The Binder framework is at the core of Android systems due to its fundamental role for interprocess communications. Applications use the Binder to perform high level tasks such as accessing location information. The importance of the Binder makes it an attractive target for attackers. Rootkits on Android platforms can arbitrarily access any Binder transaction data and therefore have system-wide security impact. In this paper, we propose H-Binder to secure the Binder IPC channel between two applications. It runs transparently with Android and COTS applications without making changes on their binaries. In this work, we design a bare-metal ARM hypervisor with …

Semeo: A Semantic Equivalence Analysis Framework For Obfuscated Android Applications, Zhen Hu

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Software repackaging is a common approach for creating malware. In this approach, malware authors inject malicious payloads into legitimate applications; then, to ren- der security analysis more difficult, they obfuscate most or all of the code. This forces analysts to spend a large amount of effort filtering out benign obfuscated methods in order to locate potentially malicious methods for further analysis. If an effective mechanism for filtering out benign obfuscated methods were available, the number of methods that must be analyzed could be reduced, allowing analysts to be more productive. In this thesis, we introduce SEMEO, a highly effective and …

Teaching Android Security Through Examples: A Publicly Available Database Of Vulnerable Apps, Daniel E. Krutz, Samuel A. Malachowsky

Articles

Security is hard, and teaching security can be even harder. Here we describe a public educational activity to assist in the instruction of both students and developers in creating secure Android apps. Our set of activities includes example vulnerable applications, information about each vulnerability, steps on how to repair the vulnerabilities, and information about how to confirm that the vulnerability has been properly repaired. Our primary goal is to make these activities available to other instructors for use in their classrooms ranging from the K-12 to university settings. A secondary goal of this project is to foster interest in security …

A Study On A Feasible No-Root Approach On Android, Yao Cheng, Yingjiu Li, Deng, Robert H., Lingyun Ying, Wei He

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Root is the administrative privilege on Android, which is however inaccessible on stock Android devices. Due to the desire for privileged functionalities and the reluctance of rooting their devices, Android users seek for no-root approaches, which provide users with part of root privileges without rooting their devices. Existing no-root approaches require users to launch a separate service via Android Debug Bridge (ADB) on an Android device, which would perform user-desired tasks. However, it is unusual for a third-party Android application to work with a separate native service via sockets, and it requires the application developers to have extra knowledge such …

Significant Permission Identification For Android Malware Detection, Lichao Sun

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

A recent report indicates that a newly developed malicious app for Android is introduced every 11 seconds. To combat this alarming rate of malware creation, we need a scalable malware detection approach that is effective and efficient. In this thesis, we introduce SigPID, a malware detection system based on permission analysis to cope with the rapid increase in the number of Android malware. Instead of analyzing all 135 Android permissions, our approach applies 3-level pruning by mining the permission data to identify only significant permissions that can be effective in distinguishing benign and malicious apps. Based on the identified significant …

A Feasible No-Root Approach On Android, Yao Cheng, Yingjiu Li, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Root is the administrative privilege on Android, which is however inaccessible on stock Android devices. Due to the desire for privileged functionalities and the reluctance of rooting their devices, Android users seek for no-root approaches, which provide users with part of root privileges without rooting their devices. In this paper, we newly discover a feasible no-root approach based on the ADB loopback. To ensure such no-root approach is not misused proactively, we examine its dark side, including privacy leakage via logs and user input inference. Finally, we discuss the solutions and suggestions from different perspectives.

Iccdetector: Icc-Based Malware Detection On Android, Xu Ke, Yingjiu Li, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Most existing mobile malware detection methods (e.g., Kirin and DroidMat) are designed based on the resources required by malwares (e.g., permissions, application programming interface (API) calls, and system calls). These methods capture the interactions between mobile apps and Android system, but ignore the communications among components within or cross application boundaries. As a consequence, the majority of the existing methods are less effective in identifying many typical malwares, which require a few or no suspicious resources, but leverage on inter-component communication (ICC) mechanism when launching stealthy attacks. To address this challenge, we propose a new malware detection method, named ICCDetector. …

Towards Automatic Generation Of Security-Centric Descriptions For Android Apps, Mu Zhang, Yue Duan, Qian Feng, Heng Yin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To improve the security awareness of end users, Android markets directly present two classes of literal app information: 1) permission requests and 2) textual descriptions. Unfortunately, neither can serve the needs. A permission list is not only hard to understand but also inadequate; textual descriptions provided by developers are not security-centric and are significantly deviated from the permissions. To fill in this gap, we propose a novel technique to automatically generate security-centric app descriptions, based on program analysis. We implement a prototype system, DESCRIBEME, and evaluate our system using both DroidBench and real-world Android apps. Experimental results demonstrate that DESCRIBEME …

Pinpoint: Efficient And Effective Resource Isolation For Mobile Security And Privacy, Paul Ratazzi, Ashok Bommisetti, Nian Ji, Wenliang Du

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

Virtualization is frequently used to isolate untrusted processes and control their access to sensitive resources. However, isolation usually carries a price in terms of less resource sharing and reduced inter-process communication. In an open architecture such as Android, this price and its impact on performance, usability, and transparency must be carefully considered. Although previous efforts in developing general-purpose isolation solutions have shown that some of these negative sideeffects can be mitigated, doing so involves overcoming significant design challenges by incorporating numerous additional platform complexities not directly related to improved security. Thus, the general purpose solutions become inefficient and burdensome if …

Comparison Of Live Response, Linux Memory Extractor (Lime) And Mem Tool For Acquiring Android’S Volatile Memory In The Malware Incident, Andri Heriyanto, Craig Valli, Peter Hannay

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

The increasing use of encryption and obfuscation within the malware development arena has necessitated the use of volatile memory acquisition on smartphone platforms. Current smartphone forensics research lacks a well-formulated process for the acquisition of volatile memory. This research evaluates and contrasts three differing tools for acquisition of volatile memory from the Android platform: Live Response, Linux Memory Extractor (LiME) and Mem Tool. Evaluation is conducted through practical examination during the analysis of an infected device. The results demonstrate a combination of LiME and the Volatility Framework provides the most robust findings. Complexities due to the nature of LiME prevent …

Network And Device Forensic Analysis Of Android Social-Messaging Applications, Daniel Walnycky, Ibrahim Baggili, Andrew Marrington, Jason Moore, Frank Breitinger

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

In this research we forensically acquire and analyze the device-stored data and network traffic of 20 popular instant messaging applications for Android. We were able to reconstruct some or the entire message content from 16 of the 20 applications tested, which reflects poorly on the security and privacy measures employed by these applications but may be construed positively for evidence collection purposes by digital forensic practitioners. This work shows which features of these instant messaging applications leave evidentiary traces allowing for suspect data to be reconstructed or partially reconstructed, and whether network forensics or device forensics permits the reconstruction of …

Semantics-Aware Android Malware Classification Using Weighted Contextual Api Dependency Graphs, Mu Zhang, Yue Duan, Heng Yin, Zhiruo Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The drastic increase of Android malware has led to a strong interest in developing methods to automate the malware analysis process. Existing automated Android malware detection and classification methods fall into two general categories: 1) signature-based and 2) machine learning-based. Signature-based approaches can be easily evaded by bytecode-level transformation attacks. Prior learning-based works extract features from application syntax, rather than program semantics, and are also subject to evasion. In this paper, we propose a novel semantic-based approach that classifies Android malware via dependency graphs. To battle transformation attacks, we extract a weighted contextual API dependency graph as program semantics to …

A Systematic Security Evaluation Of Android’S Multi-User Framework, Edward Paul Ratazzi, Yousra Aafer, Amit Ahlawat, Hao Hao, Yifei Wang, Wenliang Du

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

Like many desktop operating systems in the 1990s, Android is now in the process of including support for multiuser scenarios. Because these scenarios introduce new threats to the system, we should have an understanding of how well the system design addresses them. Since the security implications of multi-user support are truly pervasive, we developed a systematic approach to studying the system and identifying problems. Unlike other approaches that focus on specific attacks or threat models, ours systematically identifies critical places where access controls are not present or do not properly identify the subject and object of a decision. Finding these …

Tapjacking Threats And Mitigation Techniques For Android Applications, Vanessa Cooper

Dissertations, Theses and Capstone Projects

With the increased dependency on web applications through mobile devices, malicious attack techniques have now shifted from traditional web applications running on desktop or laptop (allowing mouse click- based interactions) to mobile applications running on mobile devices (allowing touch-based interactions). Clickjacking is a type of malicious attack originating in web applications, where victims are lured to click on seemingly benign objects in web pages. However, when clicked, unintended actions are performed without the user’s knowledge. In particular, it is shown that users are lured to touch an object of an application triggering unintended actions not actually intended by victims. This …