Junior Faculty Fellow Battles With Android’s Malicious Malware
An analysis done on more than a million samples of Android malware prove how malicious apps are developing malware coding that is hard to trace and identify. Despite in-depth research, malware in Android is still a major concern. The biggest challenge that researchers face is dealing with repackaged malware.
Gianluca Stringhini, an Electric and Computer Engineering Assistant Professor at Boston University is working alongside author, Suarez-Tangil has developed a way to slice away the malicious coding from the benign parts. They use the differential analysis approach to separate the software components and study the behavior of the malicious slice.
Based on this behavioral observation, Suarez-Tangil and his co-author Gianluca Stringhini can provide information on the malware’s evolution. Their approach has been applied to 1.2 million samples of malware that were in circulation between 2010 – 2017.
Even though this analysis has brought about a shift in major malware trends, and has helped understand the malware behavior, with the increase in cryptography, Gianluca Stringhini and Suarez-Tangil would have to rely on techniques such as machine learning, splicing and dynamic analysis to identify the malware that is cleverly hidden.
Gianluca Stringhini is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University and a Junior Faculty Fellow at the Hariri Institute for Computing who focuses on a data-driven approach to better understand malicious activity on the Internet. He has been investigating topics such as the spread of alternate news, memes, social networks, cyberbullying to name a few.