ALTERDROID:Differential fault Analysis of Obfuscated Smartphone Malware
- 1. ALTERDROID: Differential Fault Analysis of Obfuscated Smartphone Malware Abstract Malware for smartphones has rocketed over the last years. Market operators face the challenge of keeping their stores free from malicious apps, a task that has become increasingly complex as malware developers are progressively using advanced techniques to defeat malware detection tools. One such technique commonly observed in recent malware samples consists of hiding and obfuscating modules containing malicious functionality in places that static analysis tools overlook (e.g., within data objects). In this paper, we describe ALTERDROID, a dynamic analysis approach for detecting such hidden or obfuscated malware components distributed as parts of an app package. The key idea in ALTERDROID consists of analyzing the behavioral differences between the original app and a number of automatically generated versions of it, where a number of modifications (faults) have been carefully injected. Observable differences in terms of activities that appear or vanish in the modified app are recorded, and the resulting differential signature is analyzed through a pattern-matching process driven by rules that relate different types of hidden functionalities with patterns found in the signature. A thorough justification and a description of the proposed model are provided. The extensive experimental results obtained by testing ALTERDROID over relevant apps and malware samples support the quality and viability of our proposal Existing system Smartphones present a number of security and privacy concerns that are, in many respects, even more alarming than those existing in traditional computing environments. Most smart phone platforms are equipped with multiple sensors that can determine user location, gestures, moves and other physical activities, to name a few. Smartphones also feature high-quality audio and video recording
- 2. capabilities. Sensitive pieces of information that can be captured by these devices could be easily leaked by malware residing on the smartphone. Even apparently harmless capabilities have swiftly turned into a potential menace. Proposed system In this paper we describe ALTERDROID, a tool for detecting, through reverse engineering, obfuscated functionality in components distributed as parts of an app package. Such components are often part of a malicious app and are hidden outside its main code components (e.g. within data objects), as code components may be subject to static analysis by market operators. The key idea in ALTERDROID consists of analyzing the behavioral differences between the original app and an altered version where a number of modifications (faults) have been carefully introduced. Such modifications are designed to have no observable effect on the app execution, provided that the altered component is actually what it should be (i.e., it does not hide any unwanted functionality). For example, replacing the value of some pixels in a picture or a few characters in a string encoding an error message should not affect the execution. However, if after doing so it is observed that a dynamic class loading action crashes or a network connection does not take place, it may well be that the picture was actually a piece of code or the string a network address or a URL.