A hybrid approach for mobile security threat analysis

Abstract

Research on effective and efficient mobile threat analysis becomes an emerging and important topic in cybersecurity research area. Static analysis and dynamic analysis constitute two of the most popular types of techniques for security analysis and evaluation; nevertheless, each of them has its strengths and weaknesses. To leverage the benefits of both approaches, we propose a hybrid approach that integrates the static and dynamic analysis for detecting security threats in mobile applications. The key of this approach is the unification of data states and software execution on critical test paths. The approach consists of two phases. In the first phase, a pilot static analysis is conducted to identify potential critical attack paths based on Android APIs and existing attack patterns. In the second phase, a dynamic analysis follows the identified critical paths to execute the program in a limited and focused manner. Attacks shall be detected by checking the conformance of the detected paths with existing attack patterns. The method will report the types of detected attack scenarios based on types of sensitive data that may be compromised, such as web browser cookie.