NDLI: AppContext: Differentiating Malicious and Benign Mobile App Behaviors Using Context

Content Provider	IEEE Xplore Digital Library
Author	Wei Yang Xusheng Xiao Andow, B. Sihan Li Tao Xie Enck, W.
Copyright Year	2015
Description	Author affiliation: Dept. of Comput. Sci., North Carolina State Univ., Raleigh, NC, USA (Andow, B.; Enck, W.) \|\| NEC Labs. America, Princeton, NJ, USA (Xusheng Xiao) \|\| Dept. of Comput. Sci., Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA (Wei Yang; Sihan Li; Tao Xie)
Abstract	Mobile malware attempts to evade detection during app analysis by mimicking security-sensitive behaviors of benign apps that provide similar functionality (e.g., sending SMS messages), and suppressing their payload to reduce the chance of being observed (e.g., executing only its payload at night). Since current approaches focus their analyses on the types of security-sensitive resources being accessed (e.g., network), these evasive techniques in malware make differentiating between malicious and benign app behaviors a difficult task during app analysis. We propose that the malicious and benign behaviors within apps can be differentiated based on the contexts that trigger security-sensitive behaviors, i.e., the events and conditions that cause the security-sensitive behaviors to occur. In this work, we introduce AppContext, an approach of static program analysis that extracts the contexts of security-sensitive behaviors to assist app analysis in differentiating between malicious and benign behaviors. We implement a prototype of AppContext and evaluate AppContext on 202 malicious apps from various malware datasets, and 633 benign apps from the Google Play Store. AppContext correctly identifies 192 malicious apps with 87.7% precision and 95% recall. Our evaluation results suggest that the maliciousness of a security-sensitive behavior is more closely related to the intention of the behavior (reflected via contexts) than the type of the security-sensitive resources that the behavior accesses.
Starting Page	303
Ending Page	313
File Size	1226253
Page Count	11
File Format	PDF
ISBN	9781479919345
DOI	10.1109/ICSE.2015.50
Language	English
Publisher	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Publisher Date	2015-05-16
Publisher Place	Italy
Access Restriction	Subscribed
Rights Holder	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subject Keyword	Context Malware Androids Humanoid robots Mobile communication Electrocardiography Payloads Mobile Security; Context; Program Analysis
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

Sl.	Authority	Responsibilities	Communication Details
1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
2	Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	Host Institute of the Project: The host institute of the project is responsible for providing infrastructure support and hosting the project	https://www.iitkgp.ac.in
3	National Digital Library of India Office, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	The administrative and infrastructural headquarters of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in
4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
5	Website/Portal (Helpdesk)	Queries regarding NDLI and its services	support@ndl.gov.in
6	Contents and Copyright Issues	Queries related to content curation and copyright issues	content@ndl.gov.in
7	National Digital Library of India Club (NDLI Club)	Queries related to NDLI Club formation, support, user awareness program, seminar/symposium, collaboration, social media, promotion, and outreach	clubsupport@ndl.gov.in
8	Digital Preservation Centre (DPC)	Assistance with digitizing and archiving copyright-free printed books	dpc@ndl.gov.in
9	IDR Setup or Support	Queries related to establishment and support of Institutional Digital Repository (IDR) and IDR workshops	idr@ndl.gov.in