Static and Dynamic Analysis Techniques for Mobile Security

Alessandra Gorla, Saarland University, Germany.

As mobile devices and applications are getting more and more pervasive, mobile security is getting increasingly important. Mobile applications have access to sensitive information such as the user's location, the list of accounts used for authentication, phone numbers, email addresses and much more, and it is essential that this information is not used for malicious purposes. The goal of this course is to provide an overview of the existing techniques to either prevent or detect security vulnerabilities in mobile applications, mainly focusing on the Android platform. The first part of the course aims to provide the basic notions of static and dynamic analyses that are the foundations of the security techniques covered in the second part of the course.

At the end of the course, students should be aware of the common security issues of mobile applications, should acquire the knowledge to implement specific analyses for malware detection, and should be aware of how to possibly prevent malicious attacks.

The material for the course consists mostly of research papers, mainly because mobile security is an emerging research topic and it is not covered in any textbook.

Bibliography:

Most of the research papers that will be used for the course are listed here: http://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/edu/mobileTA/ More recent papers will be used as well.

Short Bio:

Alessandra Gorla is a postdoctoral researcher at Saarland University since April 2012. She received a Ph.D. in informatics from University of Lugano in Switzerland in 2011, and a master degree from University of Milano-Bicocca in Italy in 2006. Her areas of research are software analysis, reliability and security.