Biblio
Android, being the most widespread mobile operating systems is increasingly becoming a target for malware. Malicious apps designed to turn mobile devices into bots that may form part of a larger botnet have become quite common, thus posing a serious threat. This calls for more effective methods to detect botnets on the Android platform. Hence, in this paper, we present a deep learning approach for Android botnet detection based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). Our proposed botnet detection system is implemented as a CNN-based model that is trained on 342 static app features to distinguish between botnet apps and normal apps. The trained botnet detection model was evaluated on a set of 6,802 real applications containing 1,929 botnets from the publicly available ISCX botnet dataset. The results show that our CNN-based approach had the highest overall prediction accuracy compared to other popular machine learning classifiers. Furthermore, the performance results observed from our model were better than those reported in previous studies on machine learning based Android botnet detection.
The open-source nature of the Android OS makes it possible for manufacturers to ship custom versions of the OS along with a set of pre-installed apps, often for product differentiation. Some device vendors have recently come under scrutiny for potentially invasive private data collection practices and other potentially harmful or unwanted behavior of the preinstalled apps on their devices. Yet, the landscape of preinstalled software in Android has largely remained unexplored, particularly in terms of the security and privacy implications of such customizations. In this paper, we present the first large- scale study of pre-installed software on Android devices from more than 200 vendors. Our work relies on a large dataset of real-world Android firmware acquired worldwide using crowd-sourcing methods. This allows us to answer questions related to the stakeholders involved in the supply chain, from device manufacturers and mobile network operators to third- party organizations like advertising and tracking services, and social network platforms. Our study allows us to also uncover relationships between these actors, which seem to revolve primarily around advertising and data-driven services. Overall, the supply chain around Android's open source model lacks transparency and has facilitated potentially harmful behaviors and backdoored access to sensitive data and services without user consent or awareness. We conclude the paper with recommendations to improve transparency, attribution, and accountability in the Android ecosystem.
Trust is a critical issue in human-robot interactions (HRI) as it is the core of human desire to accept and use a non-human agent. Theory of Mind (ToM) has been defined as the ability to understand the beliefs and intentions of others that may differ from one's own. Evidences in psychology and HRI suggest that trust and ToM are interconnected and interdependent concepts, as the decision to trust another agent must depend on our own representation of this entity's actions, beliefs and intentions. However, very few works take ToM of the robot into consideration while studying trust in HRI. In this paper, we investigated whether the exposure to the ToM abilities of a robot could affect humans' trust towards the robot. To this end, participants played a Price Game with a humanoid robot (Pepper) that was presented having either low-level ToM or high-level ToM. Specifically, the participants were asked to accept the price evaluations on common objects presented by the robot. The willingness of the participants to change their own price judgement of the objects (i.e., accept the price the robot suggested) was used as the main measurement of the trust towards the robot. Our experimental results showed that robots possessing a high-level of ToM abilities were trusted more than the robots presented with low-level ToM skills.
Embodiment of actions and tasks has typically been analyzed from the robot's perspective where the robot's embodiment helps develop and maintain trust. However, we ask a similar question looking at the interaction from the human perspective. Embodied cognition has been shown in the cognitive science literature to produce increased social empathy and cooperation. To understand how human embodiment can help develop and increase trust in human-robot interactions, we created conducted a study where participants were tasked with memorizing greek letters associated with dance motions with the help of a humanoid robot. Participants either performed the dance motion or utilized a touch screen during the interaction. The results showed that participants' trust in the robot increased at a higher rate during human embodiment of motions as opposed to utilizing a touch screen device.
The development in the web technologies given growth to the new application that will make the voting process very easy and proficient. The E-voting helps in providing convenient, capture and count the votes in an election. This project provides the description about e-voting using an Android platform. The proposed e-voting system helps the user to cast the vote without visiting the polling booth. The application provides authentication measures in order to avoid fraud voters using the OTP. Once the voting process is finished the results will be available within a fraction of seconds. All the casted vote count is encrypted using AES256 algorithm and stored in the database in order to avoid any outbreaks and revelation of results by third person other than the administrator.
Mobile and IoT operating systems–and their ensuing software updates–are usually distributed as binary files. Given that these binary files are commonly closed source, users or businesses who want to assess the security of the software need to rely on reverse engineering. Further, verifying the correct application of the latest software patches in a given binary is an open problem. The regular application of software patches is a central pillar for improving mobile and IoT device security. This requires developers, integrators, and vendors to propagate patches to all affected devices in a timely and coordinated fashion. In practice, vendors follow different and sometimes improper security update agendas for both mobile and IoT products. Moreover, previous studies revealed the existence of a hidden patch gap: several vendors falsely reported that they patched vulnerabilities. Therefore, techniques to verify whether vulnerabilities have been patched or not in a given binary are essential. Deep learning approaches have shown to be promising for static binary analyses with respect to inferring binary similarity as well as vulnerability detection. However, these approaches fail to capture the dynamic behavior of these systems, and, as a result, they may inundate the analysis with false positives when performing vulnerability discovery in the wild. In particular, they cannot capture the fine-grained characteristics necessary to distinguish whether a vulnerability has been patched or not. In this paper, we present PATCHECKO, a vulnerability and patch presence detection framework for executable binaries. PATCHECKO relies on a hybrid, cross-platform binary code similarity analysis that combines deep learning-based static binary analysis with dynamic binary analysis. PATCHECKO does not require access to the source code of the target binary nor that of vulnerable functions. We evaluate PATCHECKO on the most recent Google Pixel 2 smartphone and the Android Things IoT firmware images, within which 25 known CVE vulnerabilities have been previously reported and patched. Our deep learning model shows a vulnerability detection accuracy of over 93%. We further prune the candidates found by the deep learning stage–which includes false positives–via dynamic binary analysis. Consequently, PATCHECKO successfully identifies the correct matches among the candidate functions in the top 3 ranked outcomes 100% of the time. Furthermore, PATCHECKO's differential engine distinguishes between functions that are still vulnerable and those that are patched with an accuracy of 96%.
This paper revealed the development and implementation of the wearable sensors based on transient responses of textile chemical sensors for odorant detection system as wearable sensor of humanoid robot. The textile chemical sensors consist of nine polymer/CNTs nano-composite gas sensors which can be divided into three different prototypes of the wearable humanoid robot; (i) human axillary odor monitoring, (ii) human foot odor tracking, and (iii) wearable personal gas leakage detection. These prototypes can be integrated into high-performance wearable wellness platform such as smart clothes, smart shoes and wearable pocket toxic-gas detector. While operating mode has been designed to use ZigBee wireless communication technology for data acquisition and monitoring system. Wearable humanoid robot offers several platforms that can be applied to investigate the role of individual scent produced by different parts of the human body such as axillary odor and foot odor, which have potential health effects from abnormal or offensive body odor. Moreover, wearable personal safety and security component in robot is also effective for detecting NH3 leakage in environment. Preliminary results with nine textile chemical sensors for odor biomarker and NH3 detection demonstrates the feasibility of using the wearable humanoid robot to distinguish unpleasant odor released when you're physically active. It also showed an excellent performance to detect a hazardous gas like ammonia (NH3) with sensitivity as low as 5 ppm.
In recent years, humanoid robots have become quite ubiquitous finding wide applicability in many different fields, spanning from education to entertainment and assistance. They can be considered as more complex cyber-physical systems (CPS) and, as such, they are exposed to the same vulnerabilities. This can be very dangerous for people acting that close with these robots, since attackers by exploiting their vulnerabilities, can not only violate people's privacy, but, more importantly, they can command the robot behavior causing them bodily harm, thus leading to devastating consequences. In this paper, we propose a solution not yet investigated in this field, which relies on the use of secure enclaves, which in our opinion could represent a valuable solution for coping with most of the possible attacks, while suggesting developers to adopt such a precaution during the robot design phase.
With recent advances in robotics, it is expected that robots will become increasingly common in human environments, such as in the home and workplaces. Robots will assist and collaborate with humans on a variety of tasks. During these collaborations, it is inevitable that disagreements in decisions would occur between humans and robots. Among factors that lead to which decision a human should ultimately follow, theirs or the robot, trust is a critical factor to consider. This study aims to investigate individuals' behaviors and aspects of trust in a problem-solving situation in which a decision must be made in a bounded amount of time. A between-subject experiment was conducted with 100 participants. With the assistance of a humanoid robot, participants were requested to tackle a cognitive-based task within a given time frame. Each participant was randomly assigned to one of the following initial conditions: 1) a working robot in which the robot provided a correct answer or 2) a faulty robot in which the robot provided an incorrect answer. Impacts of the faulty robot behavior on participant's decision to follow the robot's suggested answer were analyzed. Survey responses about trust were collected after interacting with the robot. Results indicated that the first impression has a significant impact on participant's behavior of trusting a robot's advice during a disagreement. In addition, this study discovered evidence supporting that individuals still have trust in a malfunctioning robot even after they have observed a robot's faulty behavior.
The purpose of this study was to propose a model of development of trust in social robots. Insights in interpersonal trust were adopted from social psychology and a novel model was proposed. In addition, this study aimed to investigate the relationship among trust development and self-esteem. To validate the proposed model, an experiment using a communication robot NAO was conducted and changes in categories of trust as well as self-esteem were measured. Results showed that general and category trust have been developed in the early phase. Self-esteem is also increased along the interactions with the robot.
Mobile phones have become nowadays a commodity to the majority of people. Using them, people are able to access the world of Internet and connect with their friends, their colleagues at work or even unknown people with common interests. This proliferation of the mobile devices has also been seen as an opportunity for the cyber criminals to deceive smartphone users and steel their money directly or indirectly, respectively, by accessing their bank accounts through the smartphones or by blackmailing them or selling their private data such as photos, credit card data, etc. to third parties. This is usually achieved by installing malware to smartphones masking their malevolent payload as a legitimate application and advertise it to the users with the hope that mobile users will install it in their devices. Thus, any existing application can easily be modified by integrating a malware and then presented it as a legitimate one. In response to this, scientists have proposed a number of malware detection and classification methods using a variety of techniques. Even though, several of them achieve relatively high precision in malware classification, there is still space for improvement. In this paper, we propose a text mining all repeated pattern detection method which uses the decompiled files of an application in order to classify a suspicious application into one of the known malware families. Based on the experimental results using a real malware dataset, the methodology tries to correctly classify (without any misclassification) all randomly selected malware applications of 3 categories with 3 different families each.
The paper is devoted to the comparison of performance of prospective lightweight block cipher Cypress with performances of the known modern lightweight block ciphers such as AES, SPECK, SPARX etc. The measurement was done on different platforms: Windows, Linux and Android. On all platforms selected, the block cipher Cypress showed the best results. The block cipher Cypress-256 showed the highest performance on Windows x32 (almost 3.5 Gbps), 64-bit Linux (over 8 Gbps) and Android (1.3 Gbps). On Windows x64 the best result was obtained by Cypress- 512 (almost 5 Gbps).