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Documents authored by Narasimhan, Krishna

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Replication Paper
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2025.40
Scaling Up: Revisiting Mining Android Sandboxes at Scale for Malware Classification (Replication Paper)

Authors: Francisco Handrick Tomaz da Costa, Ismael Medeiros, Leandro Oliveira, João Calássio, Rodrigo Bonifácio, Krishna Narasimhan, Mira Mezini, and Márcio Ribeiro

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 333, 39th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2025)

Abstract
The widespread use of smartphones in daily life has raised concerns about privacy and security among researchers and practitioners. Privacy issues are generally highly prevalent in mobile applications, particularly targeting the Android platform - the most popular mobile operating system. For this reason, several techniques have been proposed to identify malicious behavior in Android applications, including the Mining Android Sandbox approach (MAS approach), which aims to identify malicious behavior in repackaged Android applications (apps). However, previous empirical studies evaluated the MAS approach using a small dataset consisting of only 102 pairs of original and repackaged apps. This limitation raises questions about the external validity of their findings and whether the MAS approach can be generalized to larger datasets. To address these concerns, this paper presents the results of a replication study focused on evaluating the performance of the MAS approach regarding its capabilities of correctly classifying malware from different families. Unlike previous studies, our research employs a dataset that is an order of magnitude larger, comprising 4,076 pairs of apps covering a more diverse range of Android malware families. Surprisingly, our findings indicate a poor performance of the MAS approach for identifying malware, with the F1-score decreasing from 0.90 for the small dataset used in the previous studies to 0.54 in our more extensive dataset. Upon closer examination, we discovered that certain malware families partially account for the low accuracy of the MAS approach, which fails to classify a repackaged version of an app as malware correctly. Our findings highlight the limitations of the MAS approach, particularly when scaled, and underscore the importance of complementing it with other techniques to detect a broader range of malware effectively. This opens avenues for further discussion on addressing the blind spots that affect the accuracy of the MAS approach.
Cite as

Francisco Handrick Tomaz da Costa, Ismael Medeiros, Leandro Oliveira, João Calássio, Rodrigo Bonifácio, Krishna Narasimhan, Mira Mezini, and Márcio Ribeiro. Scaling Up: Revisiting Mining Android Sandboxes at Scale for Malware Classification (Replication Paper). In 39th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 333, pp. 40:1-40:26, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{handricktomazdacosta_et_al:LIPIcs.ECOOP.2025.40,
  author =	{Handrick Tomaz da Costa, Francisco and Medeiros, Ismael and Oliveira, Leandro and Cal\'{a}ssio, Jo\~{a}o and Bonif\'{a}cio, Rodrigo and Narasimhan, Krishna and Mezini, Mira and Ribeiro, M\'{a}rcio},
  title =	{{Scaling Up: Revisiting Mining Android Sandboxes at Scale for Malware Classification}},
  booktitle =	{39th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2025)},
  pages =	{40:1--40:26},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-373-7},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{333},
  editor =	{Aldrich, Jonathan and Silva, Alexandra},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2025.40},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-233320},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2025.40},
  annote =	{Keywords: Android Malware Detection, Dynamic Analysis, Mining Android Sandboxes}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2021.19
Dealing with Variability in API Misuse Specification

Authors: Rodrigo Bonifácio, Stefan Krüger, Krishna Narasimhan, Eric Bodden, and Mira Mezini

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 194, 35th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2021)

Abstract
APIs are the primary mechanism for developers to gain access to externally defined services and tools. However, previous research has revealed API misuses that violate the contract of APIs to be prevalent. Such misuses can have harmful consequences, especially in the context of cryptographic libraries. Various API-misuse detectors have been proposed to address this issue - including CogniCrypt, one of the most versatile of such detectors and that uses a language (CrySL) to specify cryptographic API usage contracts. Nonetheless, existing approaches to detect API misuse had not been designed for systematic reuse, ignoring the fact that different versions of a library, different versions of a platform, and different recommendations/guidelines might introduce variability in the correct usage of an API. Yet, little is known about how such variability impacts the specification of the correct API usage. This paper investigates this question by analyzing the impact of various sources of variability on widely used Java cryptographic libraries (including JCA/JCE, Bouncy Castle, and Google Tink). The results of our investigation show that sources of variability like new versions of the API and security standards significantly impact the specifications. We then use the insights gained from our investigation to motivate an extension to the CrySL language (named MetaCrySL), which builds on meta-programming concepts. We evaluate MetaCrySL by specifying usage rules for a family of Android versions and illustrate that MetaCrySL can model all forms of variability we identified and drastically reduce the size of a family of specifications for the correct usage of cryptographic APIs.
Cite as

Rodrigo Bonifácio, Stefan Krüger, Krishna Narasimhan, Eric Bodden, and Mira Mezini. Dealing with Variability in API Misuse Specification. In 35th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2021). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 194, pp. 19:1-19:27, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2021)

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@InProceedings{bonifacio_et_al:LIPIcs.ECOOP.2021.19,
  author =	{Bonif\'{a}cio, Rodrigo and Kr\"{u}ger, Stefan and Narasimhan, Krishna and Bodden, Eric and Mezini, Mira},
  title =	{{Dealing with Variability in API Misuse Specification}},
  booktitle =	{35th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2021)},
  pages =	{19:1--19:27},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-190-0},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2021},
  volume =	{194},
  editor =	{M{\o}ller, Anders and Sridharan, Manu},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2021.19},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-140621},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2021.19},
  annote =	{Keywords: API misuse, cryptographic API misuse detection, code generation, domain engineering, cryptographic standards}
}
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