Prof. Dr. Eric Bodden

In our new technical report Highly Precise Taint Analysis for Android Applications we present our new tool FlowDroid which implements a context-, flow-, field-, object-sensitive and lifecycle-aware static taint analysis tool for Android applications.

Furthermore, we also created an Android benchmark suite, DroidBench, as a testing ground for static and dynamic security tools.

This is joint work with Alexandre Bartel, Jacques Klein and Yves le Traon from the University of Luxembourg and with Damien Octeau and Patrick McDaniel from Penn State University.

Abstract:

Go to Source

Code analysis tools for taint tracking – statically, dynamically or hybrid – are only as good as the definition of sources and sinks. The tools check if there is a potential flow between a source and a sink and inform the analyst about their findings. We checked different code analysis tools in the area of Android and found out that all tools do only contain a hand-picked amount of sources and sinks. This gave us the motivation to create a novel tool for the fully automated generation of Android sources and sinks.

We wrote a technical report SuSi: A Tool for the Fully Automated Classification and Categorization of Android Sources and Sinks that describes the details of our approach.

Abstract:

Is the tool available online?

Yes! The tool is open source tool and can be downloaded from GitHub and here.

We – the SSE-Group (Secure Software Engineering) at EC-SPRIDE Darmstadt – created a new blog that informs you about our current research.

Our research includes, but is not limited to, the following topics:

• Android Security
• Buffer Overflow Mitigation
• Timing Channel Mitigation

If you are interested in using or extending our tools, or if you have any questions in general, do not hesitate to contact us!

Let the blogging begin!

Go to Source

Together with the group of Patrick McDaniel (Penn State) and Yves le Traon (University of Luxembourg), we have recently won a highly competitive Google Faculty Award to facilitate collaborative research on the Android infrastructure. The project “Plotting a Map of Android Inter-App Communication” is supported with 50,000 USD, but more importantly the award also gives us direct access to the related Google employees. Another award went to Prof. Michael Waidner for a collaborative project with Goethe Universität Frankfurt on “More Privacy in Online Social Networks”.

Google awards about 100 Google Faculty Awards twice a year to promote promising research projects in the field of computer science. For the current awards 600 entries have been submitted from 46 countries, 102 were successful.

Read more about the two funded projects here.

Andreas Thies from Fenruni Hagen will be presenting our award-winning tool RefaFlex at this year’s CeBIT, at Hall 9 at  stand E08 of Fraunhofer SIT. RefaFlex is our novel tool for securing programs against unintentional program changes provoked by refactorings on reflective Java programs. In case you are visiting CeBIT, make sure to stop by!

2013 International Conference on Principles and Practices of Programming on the Java platform

The Java platform is multi-faceted, covering a rich diversity of systems, languages, tools, frameworks, and techniques. PPPJ’13 – the 10th conference in the PPPJ series – provides a forum for researchers, practitioners, and educators to present and discuss novel results on all aspects of programming on the Java platform including virtual machines, languages, tools, methods, frameworks, libraries, case studies, and experience reports. Read the rest of this entry »

Co-located with PLDI, at Seattle, submit by April 4th

For more than a decade, the Soot analysis framework has enabled hundreds of users to carry out research in static analysis of Java applications. To help bring together the community, the Soot community organized a first International Workshop on the State Of the Art in JavaProgram Analysis (SOAP) in 2012. As expected, discussions and presentations at this workshop helped catalyze future development of the Soot framework, spurring discussions and collaborations between different groups using Soot and other compiler frameworks. SOAP’13 will continue that positive experience. Although the focus of SOAP will be on the Soot framework, we warmly welcome influences and inspirations from other compilers and analysis frameworks. We are particularly interested in exciting framework ideas and innovative design approaches. The agenda for SOAP will also include discussions and work on integrating external contributions into the main Soot framework, as well as explorations of potential future extensions to Soot. Find out more here.

Important dates

In our new publication SPLLIFT — Statically Analyzing Software Product Lines in Minutes Instead of Years (to appear at PLDI’13) we show how to efficiently conduct inter-procedural, flow-sensitive, context-sensitive data-flow analysis for software product lines. Previously, such analyses would have taken years, due to the many software configurations a product line encodes. Our approach SPLlift processes the entire product line at once, and typically within minutes, without any loss of precision. It works for any IFDS-based data-flow analysis. SPLlift is available as an open-source extension to our IFDS/IDE solver Heros. To access our benchmark data, click here. This is joint work with Mira Mezini, Claus Brabrand, Társis Tolêdo, Márcio Ribeiro and Paulo Borba. Read the rest of this entry »

Early-registration rates for AOSD 2013 are only available for six more days, so register now to benefit from the discount.

My colleague Ben Hermann gave an interview today on recent attacks on the Java and Flash platforms, what those attacks mean for end users and how such users can protect themselves. Ben is a member of Mira Mezini’s Software Technology Group which is closely collaborating with my own research group to develop automated software analysis tools that will in the near future allow software developers to identify possible security vulnerabilities upfront.