Biblio

Mobile and web application security, particularly the areas of data privacy, has raised much concerns from the public in recent years. Most applications, or apps for short, are installed without disclosing full information to users and clearly stating what the application has access to, which often raises concern when users become aware of unnecessary information being collected. Unfortunately, most users have little to no technical expertise in regards to what permissions should be turned on and can only rely on their intuition and past experiences to make relatively uninformed decisions. To solve this problem, we developed DroidNet, which is a crowd-sourced Android recommendation tool and framework. DroidNet alleviates privacy concerns and presents users with high confidence permission control recommendations based on the decision from expert users who are using the same apps. This paper explains the general framework, principles, and model behind DroidNet while also providing an experimental setup design which shows the effectiveness and necessity for such a tool.

Smartphones have become a prominent part of our technology driven world. When it comes to uncovering, analyzing and submitting evidence in today's criminal investigations, mobile phones play a more critical role. Thus, there is a strong need for software tools that can help investigators in the digital forensics field effectively analyze smart phone data to solve crimes. This paper will accentuate how digital forensic tools assist investigators in getting data acquisition, particularly messages, from applications on iOS smartphones. In addition, we will lay out the framework how to build a tool for verifying data integrity for any digital forensics tool.

With Android application packing technology evolving, there are more and more ways to harden APPs. Manually unpacking APPs becomes more difficult as the time needed for analyzing increase exponentially. At the beginning, the packing technology is designed to prevent APPs from being easily decompiled, tampered and re-packed. But unfortunately, many malicious APPs start to use packing service to protect themselves. At present, most of the antivirus software focus on APPs that are unpacked, which means if malicious APPs apply the packing service, they can easily escape from a lot of antivirus software. Therefore, we should not only emphasize the importance of packing, but also concentrate on the unpacking technology. Only by doing this can we protect the normal APPs, and not miss any harmful APPs at the same time. In this paper, we first systematically study a lot of DEX packing and unpacking technologies, then propose and develop a universal unpacking system, named CrackDex, which is capable of extracting the original DEX file from the packed APP. We propose three core technologies: simulation execution, DEX reassembling, and DEX restoration, to get the unpacked DEX file. CrackDex is a part of the Dalvik virtual machine, and it monitors the execution of functions to locate the unpacking point in the portable interpreter, then launches the simulation execution, collects the data of original DEX file through corresponding structure pointer, finally fulfills the unpacking process by reassembling the data collected. The results of our experiments show that CrackDex can be used to effectively unpack APPs that are packed by packing service in a universal approach without any other knowledge of packing service.

Recent literature on iOS security has focused on the malicious potential of third-party applications, demonstrating how developers can bypass application vetting and code-level protections. In addition to these protections, iOS uses a generic sandbox profile called "container" to confine malicious or exploited third-party applications. In this paper, we present the first systematic analysis of the iOS container sandbox profile. We propose the SandScout framework to extract, decompile, formally model, and analyze iOS sandbox profiles as logic-based programs. We use our Prolog-based queries to evaluate file-based security properties of the container sandbox profile for iOS 9.0.2 and discover seven classes of exploitable vulnerabilities. These attacks affect non-jailbroken devices running later versions of iOS. We are working with Apple to resolve these attacks, and we expect that SandScout will play a significant role in the development of sandbox profiles for future versions of iOS.

Smart home automation and IoT promise to bring many advantages but they also expose their users to certain security and privacy vulnerabilities. For example, leaking the information about the absence of a person from home or the medicine somebody is taking may have serious security and privacy consequences for home users and potential legal implications for providers of home automation and IoT platforms. We envision that a new ecosystem within an existing smartphone ecosystem will be a suitable platform for distribution of apps for smart home and IoT devices. Android is increasingly becoming a popular platform for smart home and IoT devices and applications. Built-in security mechanisms in ecosystems such as Android have limitations that can be exploited by malicious apps to leak users' sensitive data to unintended recipients. For instance, Android enforces that an app requires the Internet permission in order to access a web server but it does not control which servers the app talks to or what data it shares with other apps. Therefore, sub-ecosystems that enforce additional fine-grained custom policies on top of existing policies of the smartphone ecosystems are necessary for smart home or IoT platforms. To this end, we have built a tool that enforces additional policies on inter-app interactions and permissions of Android apps. We have done preliminary testing of our tool on three proprietary apps developed by a future provider of a home automation platform. Our initial evaluation demonstrates that it is possible to develop mechanisms that allow definition and enforcement of custom security policies appropriate for ecosystems of the like smart home automation and IoT.