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1. Protecting Million-User iOS Apps with Obfuscation: Motivations, Pitfalls, and Experience

   Wang, Pei; Wu, Dinghao; Chen, Zhaofeng; Wei, Tao. (May 2018, Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2018), Software Engineering in Practice (SEIP) Track)

   In recent years, mobile apps have become the infrastructure of many popular Internet services. It is now fairly common that a mobile app serves a large number of users across the globe. Different from web- based services whose important program logic is mostly placed on remote servers, many mobile apps require complicated client-side code to perform tasks that are critical to the businesses. The code of mobile apps can be easily accessed by any party after the software is installed on a rooted or jailbroken device. By examining the code, skilled reverse engineers can learn various knowledge about the design and implementation of an app. Real-world cases have shown that the disclosed critical information allows malicious parties to abuse or exploit the app-provided services for unrightful profits, leading to significant financial losses for app vendors. One of the most viable mitigations against malicious reverse engineering is to obfuscate the software before release. Despite that security by obscurity is typically considered to be an unsound protection methodology, software obfuscation can indeed increase the cost of reverse engineering, thus delivering practical merits for protecting mobile apps. In this paper, we share our experience of applying obfuscation to multiple commercial iOS apps, each of which has millions of users. We discuss the necessity of adopting obfuscation for protecting modern mobile business, the challenges of software obfuscation on the iOS platform, and our efforts in overcoming these obstacles. Our report can benefit many stakeholders in the iOS ecosystem, including developers, security service providers, and Apple as the administrator of the ecosystem. 

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2. Authentic Learning Secure Software Development (SSD) in Computing Education

   https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE.2018.8659217  

   Qian, Kai; Lo, Dan; Parizi, Reza; Wu, Fan; Agu, Emmanuel; Chu, Bei-Tseng (October 2018, IEEE Frontiers in Education (FIE) Conference)

   As mobile computing is now becoming more and more popular, the security threats to mobile applications are also growing explosively. Mobile app flaws and security defects could open doors for hackers to break into them and access sensitive information. Most vulnerabilities should be addressed in the early stage of mobile software development. However, many software development professionals lack awareness of the importance of security vulnerability and the necessary security knowledge and skills at the development stage. The combination of the prevalence of mobile devices and the rapid growth of mobile threats has resulted in a shortage of secure software development professionals. Many schools offer mobile app development courses in computing curriculum; however, secure software development is not yet well represented in most schools' computing curriculum. This paper addresses the needs of authentic and active pedagogical learning materials for SSD and challenges of building Secure Software Development (SSD) capacity through effective, engaging, and investigative approaches. In this paper, we present an innovative authentic and active SSD learning approach through a collection of transferrable learning modules with hands-on companion labs based on the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) recommendations. The preliminary feedback from students is positive. Students have gained hands-on real world SSD learning experiences with Android mobile platform and also greatly promoted self-efficacy and confidence in their mobile SSD learning. 

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3. Authentic Learning Secure Software Development (SSD) in Computing Education

   Qian, Kai; Lo, Dan; Parizi, Reza; Wu, Fan; Agu, Emmanuel; and Chu, Bei-Tseng (December 2018, 2018 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE))

   As mobile computing is now becoming more and more popular, the security threats to mobile applications are also growing explosively. Mobile app flaws and security defects could open doors for hackers to break into them and access sensitive information. Most vulnerabilities should be addressed in the early stage of mobile software development. However, many software development professionals lack awareness of the importance of security vulnerability and the necessary security knowledge and skills at the development stage. The combination of the prevalence of mobile devices and the rapid growth of mobile threats has resulted in a shortage of secure software development professionals. Many schools offer mobile app development courses in computing curriculum; however, secure software development is not yet well represented in most schools' computing curriculum. This paper addresses the needs of authentic and active pedagogical learning materials for SSD and challenges of building Secure Software Development (SSD) capacity through effective, engaging, and investigative approaches. In this paper, we present an innovative authentic and active SSD learning approach through a collection of transferrable learning modules with hands-on companion labs based on the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) recommendations. The preliminary feedback from students is positive. Students have gained hands-on real world SSD learning experiences with Android mobile platform and also greatly promoted self-efficacy and confidence in their mobile SSD learning. 

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4. TrafficAdaptor: an adaptive obfuscation strategy for vehicle location privacy against traffic flow aware attacks

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3557915.3560938  

   Qiu, Chenxi; Yan, Li; Squicciarini, Anna; Zhao, Juanjuan; Xu, Chengzhong; Pappachan, Primal (November 2022, ACM)

   One of the most popular location privacy-preserving mechanisms applied in location-based services (LBS) is location obfuscation, where mobile users are allowed to report obfuscated locations instead of their real locations to services. Many existing obfuscation approaches consider mobile users that can move freely over a region. However, this is inadequate for protecting the location privacy of vehicles, as their mobility is restricted by external factors, such as road networks and traffic flows. This auxiliary information about external factors helps an attacker to shrink the search range of vehicles' locations, increasing the risk of location exposure. In this paper, we propose a vehicle traffic flow aware attack that leverages public traffic flow information to recover a vehicle's real location from obfuscated location. As a countermeasure, we then develop an adaptive strategy to obfuscate a vehicle's location by a "fake" trajectory that follows a realistic traffic flow. The fake trajectory is designed to not only hide the vehicle's real location but also guarantee the quality of service (QoS) of LBS. Our experimental results demonstrate that 1) the new threat model can accurately track vehicles' real locations, which have been obfuscated by two state-of-the-art algorithms, and 2) the proposed obfuscation method can effectively protect vehicles' location privacy under the new threat model without compromising QoS. 

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5. SecTap: Secure Back of Device Input System for Mobile Devices

   https://doi.org/10.1109/INFOCOM.2018.8485939  

   Ling, Zhen; Luo, Junzhou; Liu, Yaowen; Yang, Ming; Wu, Kui; Fu, Xinwen (April 2018, IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM))

   Smart mobile devices have become an integral part of people's life and users often input sensitive information on these devices. However, various side channel attacks against mobile devices pose a plethora of serious threats against user security and privacy. To mitigate these attacks, we present a novel secure Back-of-Device (BoD) input system, SecTap, for mobile devices. To use SecTap, a user tilts her mobile device to move a cursor on the keyboard and tap the back of the device to secretly input data. We design a tap detection method by processing the stream of accelerometer readings to identify the user's taps in real time. The orientation sensor of the mobile device is used to control the direction and the speed of cursor movement. We also propose an obfuscation technique to randomly and effectively accelerate the cursor movement. This technique not only preserves the input performance but also keeps the adversary from inferring the tapped keys. Extensive empirical experiments were conducted on different smart phones to demonstrate the usability and security on both Android and iOS platforms. 

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