Towards a Trustworthy Android Ecosystem
Yan Chen (http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~ychen/)
Northwestern University
Date and Location: Thursday, April 25th,
2013, 12:45pm - 1:45pm @ Stuart Building, Room 111.
Abstract
Mobile devices are becoming increasingly popular. One reason for
their popularity is the availability of a wide range of third-party
applications, which enrich the environment and increase
usability. There are however various concerns centered around
these applications: privacy leakage, malware, etc. In this talk, I
will present our recent research to secure these apps towards a more
trustworthy Android ecosystem. One representative work is
Uranine, a system that instruments Android applications to detect
privacy leakages in real-time. Uranine does not require any platform
modification nor does it need the application source code. It
includes a static analysis component to instrument only paths along
which privacy leakage may happen. We designed several mechanisms to
overcome challenges introduced by framework code, callback
functions, etc. Our evaluation of Uranine shows that it is accurate
at detecting privacy leakages while providing acceptable
performance, with often unnoticeable overhead.
Biography
Dr. Yan Chen is an Associate Professor in the Department of
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Northwestern
University, Evanston, IL. He got his Ph.D. in Computer Science
at University of California at Berkeley in 2003. His research
interests include network security, measurement and diagnosis for
large scale networks and distributed systems. He won the Department
of Energy (DoE) Early CAREER award in 2005, the Department of
Defense (DoD) Young Investigator Award in 2007, and the Microsoft
Trustworthy Computing Awards in 2004 and 2005 with his colleagues.
Based on Google Scholar, his papers have been cited for over 5,200
times and his h-index is 29.