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Mobile-Sandbox: combining static and dynamic analysis with machine-learning techniques

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Abstract

Smartphones in general and Android in particular are increasingly shifting into the focus of cyber criminals. For understanding the threat to security and privacy, it is important for security researchers to analyze malicious software written for these systems. The exploding number of Android malware calls for automation in the analysis. In this paper, we present Mobile-Sandbox, a system designed to automatically analyze Android applications in novel ways: First, it combines static and dynamic analysis, i.e., results of static analysis are used to guide dynamic analysis and extend coverage of executed code. Additionally, it uses specific techniques to log calls to native (i.e., “non-Java”) APIs, and last but not least it combines these results with machine-learning techniques to cluster the analyzed samples into benign and malicious ones. We evaluated the system on more than 69,000 applications from Asian third-party mobile markets and found that about 21 % of them actually use native calls in their code.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been supported by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Grant 01BY1021 – MobWorm). We would also like to thank Felix Freiling, Konrad Rieck and Thorsten Holz for their valuable input and comments. Last but not least, we would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for proofreading our paper and for giving us helpful comments to improve this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Erlangen, Germany

    Michael Spreitzenbarth & Thomas Schreck

  2. University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany

    Florian Echtler

  3. University of Goettingen, Göttingen, Germany

    Daniel Arp

  4. Ruhr-University Bochum, Bochum, Germany

    Johannes Hoffmann

Authors
  1. Michael Spreitzenbarth
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  2. Thomas Schreck
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  3. Florian Echtler
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  4. Daniel Arp
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  5. Johannes Hoffmann
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Correspondence to Michael Spreitzenbarth.

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Spreitzenbarth, M., Schreck, T., Echtler, F. et al. Mobile-Sandbox: combining static and dynamic analysis with machine-learning techniques. Int. J. Inf. Secur. 14, 141–153 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10207-014-0250-0

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