Division of Computer and Network Systems (CNS)

Since their inception a decade ago, smartphones have become the pillars of our digital life, storing security-sensitive information ranging from medical and banking data to our entire electronic communication history. Due to our increasing reliance on mobile applications in daily life, there has been a steady increase in both the number and sophistication of mobile malware samples. This project's impacts are to make it easier for users and organizations to identify malicious applications and thereby prevent people from around the globe from becoming victims of mobile malware.

Current public-key cryptography is based on well-known problems from the area of mathematics called Number Theory. These problems are vulnerable to attacks able to exploit the superior computational power of Quantum computers (such as Shor's algorithm). Small Quantum computers are already a reality, and the cryptographic community is currently hard at work to design the new cryptographic standards which will become actual once sufficiently large Quantum computers finally become available, making current cryptographic solutions obsolete.

Large-scale computer systems that can perform challenging computations can now be leased by the general public for seconds, minutes, or hours at a time. Although these systems typically use microprocessors for most computation, recently, special reconfigurable computer chips called field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have been integrated into these publicly-available systems. Although these chips are more powerful than microprocessors, they have security weaknesses that could put users' data at risk and expose their personal information.

Malware, with harmful intent to compromise computer systems, has been one of the significant challenges to the Internet. Driven by the rich profit, relentless malware developers apply various obfuscation schemes to circumvent malware detection. Binary packing is the most common obfuscation adopted by malware authors to camouflage malicious code and defeat popular signature-based malware detection. Binary packing first encrypts or compresses malware code as data, making it immune to static analysis.

On mobile devices, the advancement and sophistication in application development and the great reliance on their functionality daily by many users makes them a critical piece of evidence for digital investigations. This project focuses on the reconstruction of app execution to recover user and fingerprint malware activities on mobile devices. The research will provide a methodology for investigators to easily outline user actions and strategies, and possible malware attack blueprint without the need for prior knowledge of the target application logic.