Yes, banking apps are as secure as other apps, but is it really the banks who are to blame?

Malicious appsAt 31C3 this year, Eric Filiol and Paul Irolla from Laboratoire de Cryptologie et Virologie Opérationnelles presented on (In)security of mobile banking app security. While I appreciate the effort to draw more attention to the insecurity of mobile applications in general, I am afraid that the talk itself was based on quite a few misconceptions, and thus gave a very wrong impression of how app development actually works and about why the code we see is as insecure as it is. Unfortunately, these misconceptions were readily amplified through the mass media (the Zeit, for instance), which is why I think someone with more experience in the field should probably clarify a few things in this respect. Continue reading

CodeInspect says “Hello World”: A new Binary Analysis Tool for Android and Java Bytecode

We are very happy to announce a new tool in our toolchain: CodeInspect – A Jimple-based Reverse-Engineering framework for Android and Java applications.

Developing an Android application in an IDE is very convenient since features like code completion, Open Declaration, renaming variables, searching files etc. help the developer a lot. Especially code-debugging is a very important feature in IDEs. Usually, all those features are available for the source code and not for the bytecode, since they support the developer not a reverse-engineer. Well, but all those features would be be also very helpful for reverse-engineering Android or Java applications. This is the reason why we came up with a new reverse-engineering framework that works on the intermediate representation Jimple and supports all the features above and a lot more. In the following we give a detailed description about CodeInspect and its features. Continue reading

SSE scoring twice at ICSE’15

What a nice early Christmas gift! Today we were notified that both our submissions to ICSE’15 got accepted. Both papers are based on our Android infrastructure. In the paper IccTA: Detecting Inter-Component Privacy Leaks in Android Apps, which came out of our long-standing collaboration with the University of Luxembourg and Penn State, we present a precise approach for Android inter-component analysis. In the paper Mining Apps for Abnormal Usage of Sensitive Data, in joint work with the group of Andreas Zeller (Saarbrücken), we present the first large scale study of using information-flow analysis to identify Android malware. Thanks a lot to all our collaborators for their hard work! It’s been a pleasure working with all of you!

BTW, in addition I will also be speaking at the New Faculty Symposium at ICSE.

Interested in TrueCrypt security? Talk to us

We have just kicked off a new project financed by the BSI which has the goal to perform a security evaluation of the current TrueCrypt code base. Do you have any particular insights about TrueCrypt security? Do you want to discuss with us more about what the advisory on the TrueCrypt homepage really means? Then meet with me at 31C3 or drop me a line. You can find my contact data and PGP key here.

2015 and 2016 Program committees

For 2015 and 2016, Eric Bodden has been invited to participate, and accepted membership in the Program Committees for the following top conferences:

  • ICSE 2016
  • OOPSLA 2016
  • ECOOP 2015
  • ISSTA 2015
  • MODULARITY/AOSD 2015
  • ONWARD 2015
  • PLDI 2015
  • RV 2015