Grant: Applied Research and Development Grants - Level 2

Analyzing malware is a difficult process. On one hand, malware employs specific evasion techniques (e.g.,little-known vulnerabilities, anti-emulation and sandbox-evasion techniques, code obfuscation); on the otherhand, it relies on security industry standards, such as encryption.Numerous efforts have been deployed to study desktop malware. Those efforts have really advanced ourunderstanding of the problem, our ability to react, our capacity to defend ourselves, and our skills to trackmalware. More recently, malware migrated to the mobile world. The growth of mobile malware quicklybecame a serious problem for this new, rapidly evolving, technology. Some studies tackle the mobile malwareproblem; however, the existing research, tools and techniques are more at the behavioural analysis level andhave not yet turned into significant detection/prevention mechanisms.The primary objective of this research project is to enhance the capabilities to detect and prevent (potentiallysensitive) data exfiltration caused by Android malware.This research project is a step toward establishing new techniques to protect privacy in the battle againstmobile malware. This will be done by detecting data leaks from malware-infected mobile devices andexpanding our overall understanding of malware behaviour. The first step towards achieving our objective is todetect data leak in unencrypted communications. The second step, which is more challenging, is to look forpossible data exfiltration hiding inside encrypted data.