Scaling Up: Revisiting Mining Android Sandboxes at Scale for Malware Classification
This program is tentative and subject to change.
The widespread use of smartphones in daily life has raised concerns about privacy and security among researchers and practitioners. Privacy issues are generally highly prevalent in mobile applications, particularly targeting the Android platform—the most popular mobile operating system. For this reason, several techniques have been proposed to identify malicious behavior in Android applications, including the Mining Android Sandbox approach (MAS approach), which aims to identify malicious behavior in repackaged Android applications (apps). However, previous empirical studies that evaluate the MAS approach has been evaluated in small datasets, typically consisting of only 102 pairs of original and repackaged apps. This limitation raises questions about the external validity of their findings and whether the MAS approach can be generalized to larger datasets. To address these concerns, this paper presents the results of a replication study focused on evaluating the performance of the MAS approach regarding its capabilities of correctly classifying malware from different families. Unlike previous studies, our research employs a dataset that is an order of magnitude larger, comprising 4,076 pairs of apps covering a more diverse range of Android malware families. Surprisingly, our findings indicate a poor performance of the MAS approach for identifying malware, with the F1-score decreasing from 0.89 for the small dataset used in the previous studies to 0.54 in our more extensive dataset. Upon closer examination, we discovered that certain malware families partially account for the low accuracy of the MAS approach, which fails to classify a repackaged version of an app as malware correctly. Our findings highlight the limitations of the MAS approach, particularly when scaled, and underscore the importance of complementing it with other techniques to detect a broader range of malware effectively. This opens avenues for further discussion on addressing the blind spots that affect the accuracy of the MAS approach.
This program is tentative and subject to change.
Tue 1 JulDisplayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change
16:15 - 17:39 | |||
16:15 21mTalk | Detecting Functionality-Specific Vulnerabilities via Retrieving Individual Functionality-Equivalent APIs in Open-Source Repositories Technical Papers Tianyu Chen Peking University, Zeyu Wang Huawei Cloud Computing Technologies Co., Ltd., Lin Li Huawei Cloud Computing Technologies Co., Ltd., Ding Li Peking University, Zongyang Li Peking University, Xiaoning Chang Huawei Cloud Computing Technologies Co., Ltd., Pan Bian Huawei Technologies CO., LTD., China, Guangtai Liang Huawei Cloud Computing Technologies, Qianxiang Wang Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd, Tao Xie Peking University | ||
16:36 21mTalk | Quantifying Cache Side-Channel Leakage by Refining Set-Based Abstractions Technical Papers | ||
16:57 21mTalk | Scaling Up: Revisiting Mining Android Sandboxes at Scale for Malware Classification Technical Papers Francisco Costa University of Brasília, Brazil, Ismael Medeiros Computer Science Department / University of Brasília, Leandro Oliveira Computer Science Department / University of Brasília, João Clássio Computer Science Department / University of Brasília, Rodrigo Bonifácio UNB, Krishna Narasimhan F1RE, Mira Mezini TU Darmstadt; hessian.AI; National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity ATHENE, Márcio Ribeiro Federal University of Alagoas, Brazil Pre-print | ||
17:18 21mTalk | Ensuring Convergence and Invariants Without Coordination Technical Papers Dina Borrego NOVA LINCS, FCT, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Carla Ferreira NOVA University Lisbon, Elisa Gonzalez Boix Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Nuno Preguica Universidade Nova de Lisboa |