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PIFT: Predictive Information-Flow Tracking

Published: 25 March 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Phones today carry sensitive information and have a great number of ways to communicate that data. As a result, malware that steal money, information, or simply disable functionality have hit the app stores. Current security solutions for preventing undesirable data leaks are mostly high-overhead and have not been practical enough for smartphones. In this paper, we show that simply monitoring just some instructions (only memory loads and stores) it is possible to achieve low overhead, highly accurate information flow tracking. Our method achieves 98% accuracy (0% false positive and 2% false negative) over DroidBench and was able to successfully catch seven real-world malware instances that steal phone number, location, and device ID using SMS messages and HTTP connections.

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Cited By

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  • (2020)FloVasion: Towards Detection of non-sensitive Variable Based Evasive Information-Flow in Android AppsIETE Journal of Research10.1080/03772063.2020.172133868:4(2580-2594)Online publication date: 2-Mar-2020
  • (2017)TriFlowProceedings of the 2017 ACM on Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3052973.3053001(640-651)Online publication date: 2-Apr-2017
  • (2017)T2Droid: A TrustZone-Based Dynamic Analyser for Android Applications2017 IEEE Trustcom/BigDataSE/ICESS10.1109/Trustcom/BigDataSE/ICESS.2017.243(240-247)Online publication date: Aug-2017
  • Show More Cited By

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ASPLOS '16: Proceedings of the Twenty-First International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems
    March 2016
    824 pages
    ISBN:9781450340915
    DOI:10.1145/2872362
    • General Chair:
    • Tom Conte,
    • Program Chair:
    • Yuanyuan Zhou
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 25 March 2016

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    Author Tags

    1. information flow tracking
    2. security

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    ASPLOS '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 53 of 232 submissions, 23%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 535 of 2,713 submissions, 20%

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2020)FloVasion: Towards Detection of non-sensitive Variable Based Evasive Information-Flow in Android AppsIETE Journal of Research10.1080/03772063.2020.172133868:4(2580-2594)Online publication date: 2-Mar-2020
    • (2017)TriFlowProceedings of the 2017 ACM on Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3052973.3053001(640-651)Online publication date: 2-Apr-2017
    • (2017)T2Droid: A TrustZone-Based Dynamic Analyser for Android Applications2017 IEEE Trustcom/BigDataSE/ICESS10.1109/Trustcom/BigDataSE/ICESS.2017.243(240-247)Online publication date: Aug-2017
    • (2019)LATCHProceedings of the 52nd Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture10.1145/3352460.3358327(969-982)Online publication date: 12-Oct-2019
    • (2018)Distributed Computing Security Model Based on Type SystemApplications and Techniques in Information Security10.1007/978-981-13-2907-4_9(109-117)Online publication date: 7-Oct-2018
    • (2019)A Dynamic Taint Analysis Framework Based on Entity EquipmentIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2019.29611447(186308-186318)Online publication date: 2019

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