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Model-Checking for Android Malware Detection

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Programming Languages and Systems (APLAS 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 8858))

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Abstract

The popularity of Android devices results in a significant increase of Android malwares. These malwares commonly steal users’ private data or do malicious tasks. Therefore, it is important to efficiently and automatically analyze Android applications and identify their malicious behaviors. This paper introduces an automatic and scalable approach to analyze Android applications and identify malicious applications. Our approach consists of modeling an Android application as a PushDown System (PDS), succinctly specifying malicious behaviors in Computation Tree Logic (CTL) or Linear Temporal Logic (LTL), and reducing the Android malware detection problem to CTL/LTL model-checking for PDSs. We implemented our techniques in a tool and applied it to analyze more than 1260 android applications. We obtained encouraging results. In particular, we discovered ten programs known as benign that are leaking private data.

This work was partially supported by STCSM Project (No. 14PJ1403200), NSFC Project (No. 61402179), SHMEC-SHEDF Project (No.13CG21), the Open Project of Shanghai Key Laboratory of Trustworthy Computing (No. 07dz22304201301), ANR grant (No.ANR-08-SEGI-006), SHEITC Project (No.130407), Shanghai Knowledge Service Platform for Trustworthy Internet of Things (No. ZF1213).

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Song, F., Touili, T. (2014). Model-Checking for Android Malware Detection. In: Garrigue, J. (eds) Programming Languages and Systems. APLAS 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8858. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12736-1_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12736-1_12

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-12735-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-12736-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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