Abstract. The ease of Android applications repackaging and proliferation of application clones in Google Play and other markets call for new effective techniques to detect repackaged code and combat distribution of cloned applications. Today all existing techniques for repackaging detection are based on code similarity or feature (e.g., permission set) similarity evaluation. We propose a new approach to detect repackaging based on the resource files available in application packages. Our tool called FSquaDRA performs a quick pairwise application comparison (full pairwise comparison for 55,000 applications in just 80 hours on a laptop), as it measures how many identical resources are present inside both packages under analysis. The intuition behind our approach is that malicious repackaged applications still need to maintain the "look and feel" of the originals by including the same images and other resource files, even though they might have additional code included or some of the original code removed. To evaluate the reliability of our approach we perform a comparison of the FSquaDRA similarity scores with the code-based similarity scores of AndroGuard for a dataset of randomly selected application pairs, and our results demonstrate strong positive correlation of the FSquaDRA resource-based score with the code-based similarity score.
Abstract. Performing a thorough security risk assessment of an organisation has always been challenging, but with the increased reliance on outsourced and off-site third-party services, i.e., "cloud services", combined with internal (legacy) IT-infrastructure and -services, it has become a very difficult and time-consuming task. One of the traditional tools available to ease the burden of performing a security risk assessment and structure security analyses in general is attack trees [19,23,24], a tree-based formalism inspired by fault trees, a well-known formalism used in safety engineering. In this paper we study an extension of traditional attack trees, called attack-defense trees, in which not only the attacker's actions are modelled, but also the defensive actions taken by the attacked party [15]. In this work we use the attack-defense tree as a goal an attacker wants to achieve, and separate the behaviour of the attacker and defender from the attack-defense-tree. We give a fully stochastic timed semantics for the behaviour of the attacker by introducing attacker profiles that choose actions probabilistically and execute these according to a probability density. Lastly, the stochastic semantics provides success probabilitites for individual actions. Furthermore, we show how to introduce costs of attacker actions. Finally, we show how to automatically encode it all with a network of timed automata, an encoding that enables us to apply state-of-the-art model checking tools and techniques to perform fully automated quantitative and qualitative analyses of the modelled system.
Abstract. Securing automated teller machines (ATMs), as critical and complex infrastructure, requires a precise understanding of the associated threats. This paper reports on the application of attack-defense trees to model and analyze the security of ATMs. We capture the most dangerous multi-stage attack scenarios applicable to ATM structures, and establish a practical experience report, where we reflect on the process of modeling ATM threats via attack-defense trees. In particular, we share our insights into the benefits and drawbacks of attack-defense tree modeling, as well as best practices and lessons learned.
Today, there are millions of third-party Android applications. Some of them are buggy or even malicious. To identify such applications, novel frameworks for automated black-box testing and dynamic analysis are being developed by the Android community. Code coverage is one of the most common metrics for evaluating effectiveness of these frameworks. Furthermore, code coverage is used as a fitness function for guiding evolutionary and fuzzy testing techniques. However, there are no reliable tools for measuring fine-grained code coverage in black-box Android app testing.
We present the Android Code coVerage Tool, ACVTool for short, that instruments Android apps and measures code coverage in the black-box setting at class, method and instruction granularity. ACVTool has successfully instrumented 96.9% of apps in our experiments. It introduces a negligible instrumentation time overhead, and its runtime overhead is acceptable for automated testing tools. We demonstrate practical value of ACVTool in a large-scale experiment with Sapienz, a state-of-the-art automated testing tool. Using ACVTool on the same cohort of apps, we have compared different coverage granularities applied by Sapienz in terms of the found amount of crashes. Our results show that none of the applied coverage granularities clearly outperforms others in this aspect.
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