We are happy to announce that our CodeInspect website is now online. Please check it out at: codeinspect.de and receive a free trial version!
Author Archives: Siegfried Rasthofer
CodeInspect awarded at the HIGHEST Startup Contest
CodeInspect was awarded the second prize at the HIGHEST startup contest at TU Darmstadt. In a multi-stage selection process, we had to convince the judges about our business concept for the need of more security in the mobile world. All in all, we competed against 74 other business ideas from different departments at the TU Darmstadt such as mechanical engineering, chemistry, etc.
More information about the other winners and the ceremony can be found here.
Harvester will be presented at NDSS 2016
We are happy to announce our new publication “Harvesting Runtime Values in Android Applications That Feature Anti-Analysis Techniques” which will be presented at NDSS 2016. Harvester combines static and dynamic code analysis techniques to extract runtime values (e.g. URLs, SMS messages/numbers, etc.) from Android binaries. Furthermore, it can also be used for de-obfuscating Android applications. More details can be found here.
Looking forward to a great conference.
SSE Group contributes to McAfee’s Q4 Threat Report
As a follow up to our BlackHat EU 2015 presentation about benign applications not securing user data in the cloud (Backend-as-a-Service) we also looked into malicious applications whether we can find similar data leakages. In a collaboration with McAfee Security Lab (Intel Security Lab) we analyzed 294,817 malware-laden mobile apps and found that 16 of them are connected with vulnerable Backend-as-a-Service instances implemented in Facebook Parse. Since the malware authors did not secure the backend (BaaS-backend) securely we had access to the complete database including Command&Control (C&C) communications and tasks for victims. This gave us very interesting insights about current state-of-the-art C&C communication/protocols in the context of mobile malware.
The results were presented at VirusBulletin 2015 and AVAR 2015. More details can be looked up from our whitepaper and the corresponding slides. This project is also part of McAfee’s Q4 Threat report.
Media report:
- Darkread [12/15/2015]
Blackhat Slides and Paper are online!
We presented our Backend-as-a-Service investigation at Blackhat Europe 2015.
The slides are available here. The paper contains more details and you can find it here.
Update: First news report available here.
What provokes Android users into revealing private information? – Paper accepted at HICCS
In a joined work together with Nicole Eling and Prof. Buxmann from TU Darmstadt, we published a very interesting market experiment on users’ reaction to fine-grained permission requests. This work thus explores the following research questions using a self-developed mobile application:
- How does the precision of an information request influence users’ disclosure of personal information?
- Is this effect different for users with different security backgrounds?
SSE Group together with Intel Security are presenting at VirusBulletin 2015 conference
A joint project together with McAfee (Intel Security) revealed very interesting insights into current Android Malware, in particular into Command and Control communications. We will be presenting our results at the VirusBulletin 2015 conference. We are also planning to publish a blog post with more concrete information, but if you are at VirusBulletin conference, feel free to join our talk on Thursday 1 October 09:00 – 09:30.
Title: We know what you did this summer: Android banking trojan exposing its sins in the cloud
SSE Group is presenting at Black Hat Europe 2015
At this year Black Hat Europe conference, we will talk about our Backend-As-A-Service investigation, which we published a couple of months ago.
The talk will contain a full disclosure about our investigation including details about our automatic “exploit generator”.
Title of the talk: “(IN-)SECURITY OF BACKEND-AS-A-SERVICE PROVIDERS”
Abstract
If you are around, feel free to join our talk and also to meet at the conference.
[Bachelor-Thesis] Evaluating the Effectiveness of Android Malware Detection Approaches
We are looking for an interested student who wants to write her/his bachelor-thesis at the Secure Software Engineering Group about Android Security.
Title: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Android Malware Detection Approaches
All Your Code Belongs To Us – Dismantling Android Secrets With CodeInspect
Steven will give a talk about CodeInspect at the leading international conference on software development GOTO Copenhagen. We are looking forward for a great conference.
Title of the talk: “All Your Code Belongs To Us – Dismantling Android Secrets With CodeInspect”
Abstract of the talk: