The Computers & Security journal, Elsevier, published online, recently, our paper “Incorporating Attacker Capabilities in Risk Estimation and Mitigation“. We propose in this paper the use of attacker capabilities in estimating the risk of threats. Attacker capabilities are the abilities to access system resources that allow to attack the system. We argue that the proposed factor allows the experts to have close risk estimates, which would increase the confidence in risk assessment.

We have extended the submission deadline for SOAP. You still have until March 31st to submit your paper! We are looking forward to your submission!

Stephan Huber and I found a dangerous tapjacking vulnerability in the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) which causes serious security issues. Tapjacking, which is similar to clickjacking for web applications, is an attack where the user clicks/taps on seemingly benign objects in applications, triggering unintended actions not actually intended by the victim[1]. This results to dangerous security issues. Unfortunately, we already found malware samples in the wild that include our attack. To the best of our knowledge, the attack seems to apply to all currently available Android versions back til version 2.3. The attack, together with a patch, has already been submitted to the Android Security team who confirmed our vulnerability and add our patch to the next major release of the AOSP. More details on the attack will follow as soon as the AOSP is patched. The contribution is nominated for Google’s Patch Award.

[1] Marcus Niemietz and Jörg Schwenk, UI Redressing Attacks on Android Devices, BlackHat Asia 2014

Over the past few days, the news has been full of a report of “dormant” malware that infected millions of Android devices. (German article here on Heise.de.) The malware previously went unnoticed by laying dormant for several hours, sometimes multiple days, after installation, in some cases even requiring a reboot of the device to become active. Dynamic-analysis procedures usually only run for minutes and for efficiency reasons do not simulate situations like reboot Contrary to the current perception, though, this problem had long been identified, and in fact today with this article we are revealing Harvester, a new tool to address exactly this problem.

Harvester* uses a unique novel combination of static and dynamic analysis and code transformation to (1) identify and eliminate emulator and timeout checks from apps, and (2) that way allows for the extraction of interesting runtime values such as reflective method calls, target numbers of calls to the SMS APIs, account-data hard-wired in the malware, etc. In addition, Harvester is resilient against virtually all current cases of code obfuscation.

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If you are interested in CodeInspect and would like to support us testing it, feel free to contact us (Siegfried Rasthofer) and we will provide you all the necessary information.

There is only one little requirement: due to legal restrictions (test license agreement), CodeInspect is currently only available to corporate customers.

We are co-organizing the First International Workshop on Agile Secure Software Development (ASSD’15) with Prof. Röning from University of Oulu, Finland. The workshop is organized in conjunction with ARES 2015, which will be hosted in Toulouse, France from 24th to 28th August, 2015. We are looking for papers related to applying the agile approach and methods to develop secure software. We encourage you to submit your paper to the workshop.

Read on here for an extensive interview with Steven Arzt in the Süddeutsche Zeitung about the recent malware threat we discovered and about Android malware in general. Spiegel Online also has an article that draws information from the interview.

Our micro-benchmark suite DroidBench (published with FlowDroid at PLDI’14) aims at testing the precision and recall of static taint tracking tools for Android. It provides categorized, tested, and well-documented test cases for the various hard challenges in program analysis. The ground truth is provides makes it easy to check and compare the results of the various information-flow analysis tools proposed both in research and available commercially.

The suite has been used by various research groups all over the world and we have seen tools greatly improve on the precision and recall they achieve on DroidBench. With many tools now achieving very good results, it is time for new challenges.

We are thus happy to announce that DroidBench 2.0 is now available from Github. It features 120 test cases in 13 categories including aliasing, implicit data flows, Android lifecycle handling, inter-component communication, and reflective method calls. We would like to thank all the researchers world wide that have contributed to DroidBench and would like to extend this call: Feel free to propose and/or submit new test cases to extend the suite even further so that it can continue to serve as a standardized benchmark suite for research in the field of static taint tracking.

All kinds of contributions are welcome. We have started to also add test cases challenging dynamic analysis tools, for instance emulator-detection mechanisms. In the future, we also plan to add test cases that leverage native code to hide data flows.