Covert Communication in Mobile Applications
Name
Covert_Communication_in_Mobile_Applications_2015.pdf
Size
838.32 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
681d209540fd81be336c96a756839151
Author(s)
Rubin, Julia
Gordon, Michael I.
Nguyen, Nguyen
Rinard, Martin C.
Date Issued
November 2015
Journal
Proceedings of the 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Citation
Rubin, Julia, Michael I. Gordon, Nguyen Nguyen, and Martin Rinard. "Covert Communication in Mobile Applications." 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (November 2015).
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
This paper studies communication patterns in mobile applications. Our analysis shows that 63% of the external communication made by top-popular free Android applications from Google Play has no effect on the user-observable application functionality. To detect such covert communication in an efficient manner, we propose a highly precise and scalable static analysis technique: it achieves 93% precision and 61% recall compared to the empirically determined “ground truth”, and runs in a matter of a few minutes. Furthermore, according to human evaluators, in 42 out of 47 cases, disabling connections deemed covert by our analysis leaves the delivered application experience either completely intact or with only insignificant interference. We conclude that our technique is effective for identifying and disabling covert communication. We then use it to investigate communication patterns in the 500 top-popular applications from Google Play.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
http://ase2015.unl.edu/#tab-papers
