Hayyan Salman Hasan; Hasan Muhammad Deeb; Behrouz Tork Ladani
Abstract
Sensitive methods are those that are commonly used by Android malware to perform malicious behavior. These methods may be either evasion or malicious payload methods. Although there are several approaches to handle these methods for performing effective dynamic malware analysis, but generally most of ...
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Sensitive methods are those that are commonly used by Android malware to perform malicious behavior. These methods may be either evasion or malicious payload methods. Although there are several approaches to handle these methods for performing effective dynamic malware analysis, but generally most of them are based on a manually created list. However, the performance shown by the selected approaches is dependent on completeness of the manually created list that is not almost a complete and up-to-date one. Missing some sensitive methods causes to degrade the overall performance and affects the effectiveness of analyzing Android malware.In this paper, we propose a machine learning approach to predict new sensitive methods that might be used in Android malware. We use a manually collected training dataset to train two classifiers: a classifier for detecting the sensitivity nature of the Android methods, and another classifier to categorize the detected sensitive methods into predefined categories. We applied the proposed approach to a large number of methods extracted from Android API 27. The proposed approach is able to predict hundreds of sensitive methods with accuracy of 90.5% for the first classifier and 87.4% for the second classifier. To evaluate the proposed approach, we built a new list of the detected sensitive methods and used it in a number of tools to perform dynamic malware analysis. The proposed model found various sensitive methods that were not considered before by any other tools. Hence, the effectiveness of these tools in performing dynamic analysis are increased.
Amirhosein Sayyadabdi; Behrouz Tork Ladani; Bahman Zamani
Abstract
Android is a widely used operating system that employs a permission-based access control model. The Android Permissions System (APS) is responsible for mediating application resource requests. APS is a critical component of the Android security mechanism; hence, a failure in the design of APS can potentially ...
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Android is a widely used operating system that employs a permission-based access control model. The Android Permissions System (APS) is responsible for mediating application resource requests. APS is a critical component of the Android security mechanism; hence, a failure in the design of APS can potentially lead to vulnerabilities that grant unauthorized access to resources by malicious applications. In this paper, we present a formal approach for modeling and verifying the security properties of APS. We demonstrate the usability of the proposed approach by showcasing the detection of a well-knownvulnerability found in Android’s custom permissions.
Afshin Karampour; Maede Ashouri-Talouki; Behrouz Tork Ladani
Abstract
Smart grids using information technology (IT) and communication networks control smart home appliances to reduce costs and increase reliability and transparency. Preserving the privacy of the user data is one of the biggest challenges in smart grid research; by disclosing user-related data, an internal ...
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Smart grids using information technology (IT) and communication networks control smart home appliances to reduce costs and increase reliability and transparency. Preserving the privacy of the user data is one of the biggest challenges in smart grid research; by disclosing user-related data, an internal or external adversary can understand the habits and behavior of the users. A solution to address this challenge is, however, a data aggregation mechanism in which the aggregated data of all of the users in a residential area. The security and efficiency of the data aggregation approach are important. The drawback of the previous works is leaking fine-grained user data or the high computation and communication overhead. In this paper, we present an efficient privacy-preserving data-aggregation protocol, called PPDA, based on the Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and Anonymous Veto network protocol. The PPDA protocol aggregates metering data efficiently and securely so that it becomes applicable for resource-constraint metering devices. We also present an improved multi-cycle proposal of PPDA, called MC-PPDA. In the improved approach, the system initialization step runs only at the first cycle of the protocol which increases the efficiency of the protocol. Evaluation results show that the proposed approaches preserve the privacy of the fine-grained user data against an internal and external adversary; the improved multi-cycle approach is also secure against collusion. Compared to the previous approaches, the proposed approaches incur less computation and communication overhead.
Seyed Behnam Andarzian; Behrouz Tork Ladani
Volume 14, Issue 1 , January 2022, , Pages 13-25
Abstract
Most of the current research on static analysis of Android applications for security vetting either work on Java source code or the Dalvik bytecode. Nevertheless, Android allows developers to use C or C++ code in their programs that is compiled into various binary architectures. Moreover, Java and the ...
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Most of the current research on static analysis of Android applications for security vetting either work on Java source code or the Dalvik bytecode. Nevertheless, Android allows developers to use C or C++ code in their programs that is compiled into various binary architectures. Moreover, Java and the native code components (C or C++) can collaborate with each other using Java Native Interface. Recent research shows that native codes are frequently used in both benign and malicious Android applications. Most of the present Android static analysis tools avert considering native codes in their analysis and applied trivial models for their data-flow analysis. As we know only the open source JN-SAF tool has tried to solve this issue statically. However, there are still challenges like libC functions and multi-threading in native codes that we want to address in this work. We presented SANT as an extension of JN-SAF for supporting Static Analysis of Native Threads. We considered modeling libC functions in our data-flow analysis to have a more precise analysis when dealing with security vetting of native codes. We also used control flow and data dependence graphs in SANT to handle multiple concurrent threads and find implicit data-flow between them. Our experiments show that the conducted improvements outperforms JN-SAF in real-world benchmark applications.
Hayyan Hasan; Behrouz Tork Ladani; Bahman Zamani
Abstract
Dynamic analysis is a prominent approach in analyzing the behavior of Android apps. To perform dynamic analysis, we need an event generator to provide proper environment for executing the app in an emulator. Monkey is the most popular event generator for Android apps in general, and is used in dynamic ...
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Dynamic analysis is a prominent approach in analyzing the behavior of Android apps. To perform dynamic analysis, we need an event generator to provide proper environment for executing the app in an emulator. Monkey is the most popular event generator for Android apps in general, and is used in dynamic analysis of Android malware as well. Monkey provides high code coverage and yet high speed in generating events. However, in the case of malware analysis, Monkey suffers from several limitations. It only considers UI events but no system events, and because of random behavior in generating UI events, it may lose dropping the connectivity of the test environment during the analysis process. Moreover, it provides no defense against malware evasion techniques. In this paper, we try to enhance Monkey by reducing its limitations while preserving its advantages. The proposed approach has been implemented as an extended version of Monkey, named Curious-Monkey. Curious-Monkey provides facilities for handling system events, handling evasion techniques, and keeping the test environment's connectivity up during the analysis process. We conducted many experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed tool regarding two important criteria in dynamic malware analysis: the ability to trigger malicious payloads and the code coverage. In the evaluation process, we used the Evadroid benchmark and the AMD malware dataset. Moreover, we compared Curious-Monkey with Monkey and Ares tools. The results show that the Curious-Monkey provides better results in case of triggering malicious payloads, as well as better code coverage.
Seyed Alireza Hasheminasab; Behrouz Tork Ladani; Tansu Alpcan
Abstract
In today's highly interconnected networks, security of the entities are often interdependent. This means security decisions of the agents are not only influenced by their own costs and constraints, but also are affected by their neighbors’ decisions. Game theory provides a rich set of tools to ...
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In today's highly interconnected networks, security of the entities are often interdependent. This means security decisions of the agents are not only influenced by their own costs and constraints, but also are affected by their neighbors’ decisions. Game theory provides a rich set of tools to analyze such influence networks. In the game model, players try to maximize their utilities through security investments considering the network structure, costs and constraints, which have been set by the network owner. However, decisions of selfish entities to maximize their utilities do not always lead to a socially optimum solution. Therefore, motivating players to reach the social optimum is of high value from the network owner’s point of view. The network owner wants to maximize the overall network security by designing the game's parameters. As far as we know, there is no notable work in the context of linear influence networks to introduce appropriate game design for this purpose. This paper presents design methods that make use of the adjustments of players’ costs, interdependencies, and constraints to align players' incentives with a network-wide global objective. We present a comprehensive investigation of existence and uniqueness conditions of Nash Equilibrium in such environments. Furthermore, numerical results of applying the proposed mechanisms in a sample real-world example are illustrated.
S. Ghasemi Falavarjani; Behrouz Tork Ladani; S. Ghasemi
Abstract
An important issue in P2P networks is the existence of malicious nodes that decreases the performance of such networks. Reputation system in which nodes are ranked based on their behavior, is one of the proposed solutions to detect and isolate malicious (low ranked) nodes. Gossip Trust is an interesting ...
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An important issue in P2P networks is the existence of malicious nodes that decreases the performance of such networks. Reputation system in which nodes are ranked based on their behavior, is one of the proposed solutions to detect and isolate malicious (low ranked) nodes. Gossip Trust is an interesting previously proposed algorithm for reputation aggregation in P2P networks based on the concept of gossip. Despite its important contribution, this algorithm has deficiencies especially with high number of nodes that leads to high execution time and low accuracy in the results. In this paper, a grouped Gossip based Reputation Aggregation (GGRA) algorithm is proposed. In GGRA, Gossip Trust is executed in each group between group members and between groups instead of executing in the whole network. Due to the reduction in the number of nodes and using strongly connected graph instead of a weakly one, gossip algorithm in GGRA is executed quickly. With grouping, not only reputation aggregation is expected to be more scalable, but also because of the decrement in the number of errors of the gossiped communication, the results get more accurate. The evaluation of the proposed algorithm and its comparison with Gossip Trust confirms the expected results.
M. Ezhei; B. Tork Ladani
Abstract
Nowadays, the growth of virtual environments such as virtual organizations, social networks, and ubiquitous computing, has led to the adoption of trust concept. One of the methods of making trust in such environments is to use a long-term relationship with a trusted partner. The main problem of this ...
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Nowadays, the growth of virtual environments such as virtual organizations, social networks, and ubiquitous computing, has led to the adoption of trust concept. One of the methods of making trust in such environments is to use a long-term relationship with a trusted partner. The main problem of this kind of trust, which is based on personal experiences, is its limited domain. Moreover, both parties of such trust relationship will face big problems of collecting data and forming reasonable and reliable beliefs. Considering the concept of "group" in modeling trust is a way to overcome the above mentioned problems. Since, group-based trust is more suited with the nature of trust in new virtual environments. In this paper, a new trust model called "GTrust" is proposed in which trust is considered as a collective and shared feature of all group members. Therefore, group membership is used as the judgment criteria regarding a person's expected behavior and how he can be a trustee. GTrust is based on Metagraphs which are graphical data structures for representing a collection of directed set-to-set mappings. We show that by using GTrust, large trust spaces between unknown individuals can be shaped effectively. The proposed model not only offers a better description of human sense of trust when considering communities, but also provides the setting for evaluating the trust of individuals whom we do not know, and therefore provides an extended evaluation domain.
Z. Derakhshandeh; B. Tork Ladani
Abstract
Despite significant advances in the access control domain, requirements of new computational environments like web services still raise new challenges. Lack of appropriate method for specification of access control policies (ACPs), composition, verification and analysis of them have all made the access ...
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Despite significant advances in the access control domain, requirements of new computational environments like web services still raise new challenges. Lack of appropriate method for specification of access control policies (ACPs), composition, verification and analysis of them have all made the access control in the composition of web services a complicated problem. In this paper, a new independent formal model called Constrained Policy Graph (CPG) for specification of ACPs and their composition as well as verification of conflict or incompatibility among the ACPs is represented. It is shown how CPG can be used in modeling and verification of web service composition ACPs. Also the application of CPG for modeling policies in BPEL processes -as the most common composition method for web services- is illustrated.