Android smartphones are becoming increasingly popular. The open nature of Android allows users to install miscellaneous applications, including the malicious ones, from third-party marketplaces without rigorous sanity checks. A large portion of existing malwares perform stealthy operations such as sending short messages, making phone calls and HTTP connections, and installing additional malicious components. In this paper, we propose a novel technique to detect such stealthy behavior. We model stealthy behavior as the program behavior that mismatches with user interface, which denotes the user's expectation of program behavior. We use static program analysis to attribute a top level function that is usually a user interaction function with the behavior it performs. Then we analyze the text extracted from the user interface component associated with the top level function. Semantic mismatch of the two indicates stealthy behavior. To evaluate AsDroid, we download a pool of 182 apps that are potentially problematic by looking at their permissions. Among the 182 apps, AsDroid reports stealthy behaviors in 113 apps, with 28 false positives and 11 false negatives.
Existing mutation based fuzzers tend to randomly mutate the input of a program without understanding its underlying syntax and semantics. In this paper, we propose a novel onthe-fly probing technique (called ProFuzzer) that automatically recovers and understands input fields of critical importance to vulnerability discovery during a fuzzing process and intelligently adapts the mutation strategy to enhance the chance of hitting zero-day targets. Since such probing is transparently piggybacked to the regular fuzzing, no prior knowledge of the input specification is needed. During fuzzing, individual bytes are first mutated and their fuzzing results are automatically analyzed to link those related together and identify the type for the field connecting them; these bytes are further mutated together following typespecific strategies, which substantially prunes the search space. We define the probe types generally across all applications, thereby making our technique application agnostic. Our experiments on standard benchmarks and real-world applications show that ProFuzzer substantially outperforms AFL and its optimized version AFLFast, as well as other state-of-art fuzzers including VUzzer, Driller and QSYM. Within two months, it exposed 42 zero-days in 10 intensively tested programs, generating 30 CVEs.
Abstract-The Android framework has raised increased security concerns with regards to its access control enforcement. Particularly, existing research efforts successfully demonstrate that framework security checks are not always consistent across appaccessible APIs. However, existing efforts fall short in addressing peculiarities that characterize the complex Android access control and the diversity introduced by the heavy vendor customization. In this paper, we develop a new analysis framework AceDroid that models Android access control in a path-sensitive manner and normalizes diverse checks to a canonical form. We applied our proposed modeling to perform inconsistency analysis for 12 images. Our tool proved to be quite effective, enabling to detect a significant number of inconsistencies introduced by various vendors and to suppress substantial false alarms. Through investigating the results, we uncovered high impact attacks enabling to write a key logger, send premium sms messages, bypass user restrictions, perform a major denial of services and other critical operations.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.