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Towards Understanding the Role of Execution Context for Observing Malicious Behavior in Android Malware

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Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 764))

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Abstract

Favorite target of mobile malware, Android operating system can now rely on numerous tools, instrumentations and sandbox environments to fight back the malware threat. Sandboxing is a popular dynamic approach to detect malware, where an application is submitted to a plethora of tests in order to determine the presence of malicious behavior. Such existing sandboxes usually performed analysis on a malware sample once, given the tremendous amount of applications to analyze. In order to further study what trigger malware behavior, we decided to submit a malware sample multiple times to our sandbox, each time with slightly different experiment parameters, such as level of user simulation, the number of user actions performed, and the network configuration. Our results show that a proper configuration of these parameters will yield more information about the sample under study.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://developer.android.com/tools/help/monkey.html.

  2. 2.

    http://www.malgenomeproject.org/.

  3. 3.

    https://play.google.com/store.

  4. 4.

    http://www.appsapk.com/.

  5. 5.

    http://contagiodump.blogspot.ca/.

  6. 6.

    All IP traffic other than DNS queries is sinkholed to an IP not on the network.

  7. 7.

    All IP traffic other than DNS queries is sinkholed to an IP for which no ports are open but fake TCP SynAck packets are sent back in response to any TPC Syn (thus properly completing the 3-way handshake).

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Correspondence to François Gagnon .

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Boileau, C., Gagnon, F., Poisson, J., Frenette, S., Mejri, M. (2017). Towards Understanding the Role of Execution Context for Observing Malicious Behavior in Android Malware. In: Obaidat, M. (eds) E-Business and Telecommunications. ICETE 2016. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 764. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67876-4_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67876-4_3

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