PuppetDroid: A User-Centric UI Exerciser for Automatic Dynamic Analysis of Similar Android Applications

@TechReport{	  gianazza_puppetdroid_tr_2014,
  abstract	= {Popularity and complexity of malicious mobile applications
		  are rising, making their analysis difficult and labor
		  intensive. Mobile application analysis is indeed inherently
		  different from desktop application analysis: In the latter,
		  the interaction of the user (i.e., victim) is crucial for
		  the malware to correctly expose all its malicious
		  behaviors. We propose a novel approach to analyze
		  (malicious) mobile applications. The goal is to exercise
		  the user interface (UI) of an Android application to
		  effectively trigger malicious behaviors, automatically. Our
		  key intuition is to record and reproduce the UI
		  interactions of a potential victim of the malware, so as to
		  stimulate the relevant behaviors during dynamic analysis.
		  To make our approach scale, we automatically re-execute the
		  recorded UI interactions on apps that are similar to the
		  original ones. These characteristics make our system
		  orthogonal and complementary to current dynamic analysis
		  and UI-exercising approaches. We developed our approach and
		  experimentally shown that our stimulation allows to reach a
		  higher code coverage than automatic UI exercisers, so to
		  unveil interesting malicious behaviors that are not exposed
		  when using other approaches. Our approach is also suitable
		  for crowdsourcing scenarios, which would push further the
		  collection of new stimulation traces. This can potentially
		  change the way we conduct dynamic analysis of (mobile)
		  applications, from fully automatic only, to user-centric
		  and collaborative too.},
  author	= {Gianazza, Andrea and Maggi, Federico and Fattori, Aristide
		  and Cavallaro, Lorenzo and Zanero, Stefano},
  date		= {2014-02-19},
  file		= {files/papers/reports/gianazza_puppetdroid_tr_2014.pdf},
  institution	= {arXiv},
  shorttitle	= {PuppetDroid},
  title		= {PuppetDroid: A User-Centric UI Exerciser for Automatic
		  Dynamic Analysis of Similar Android Applications},
  url		= {http://arxiv.org/abs/1402.4826}
}