The unprecedented growth in mobile systems has transformed the way we approach everyday computing. Unfortunately, the emergence of a sophisticated type of malware known as ransomware poses a great threat to consumers of this technology. Traditional research on mobile malware detection has focused on approaches that rely on analyzing bytecode for uncovering malicious apps. However, cybercriminals can bypass such methods by embedding malware directly in native machine code, making traditional methods inadequate. Another challenge that detection solutions face is scalability. The sheer number of malware variants released every year makes it difficult for solutions to efficiently scale their coverage.
To address these concerns, this work presents RansomShield, an energy-efficient solution that leverages CNNs to detect ransomware. We evaluate CNN architectures that have been known to perform well on computer vision tasks and examine their suitability for ransomware detection. We show that systematically converting native instructions from Android apps into images using space-filling curve visualization techniques enable CNNs to reliably detect ransomware with high accuracy. We characterize the robustness of this approach across ARM and x86 architectures and demonstrate the effectiveness of this solution across heterogeneous platforms including smartphones and chromebooks. We evaluate the suitability of different models for mobile systems by comparing their energy demands using different platforms. In addition, we present a CNN introspection framework that determines the important features that are needed for ransomware detection. Finally, we evaluate the robustness of this solution against adversarial machine learning (AML) attacks using state-of-the-art Android malware dataset.
Brainwaves have demonstrated to be unique enough across individuals to be useful as biometrics. They also provide promising advantages over traditional means of authentication, such as resistance to external observability, revocability, and intrinsic liveness detection. However, most of the research so far has been conducted with expensive, bulky, medical-grade helmets, which offer limited applicability for everyday usage. With the aim to bring brainwave authentication and its benefits closer to real world deployment, we investigate brain biometrics with consumer devices. We conduct a comprehensive measurement experiment and user study that compare five authentication tasks on a user sample up to 10 times larger than those from previous studies, introducing three novel techniques based on cognitive semantic processing. Furthermore, we apply our analysis on high-quality open brainwave data obtained with a medical-grade headset, to assess the differences. We investigate both the performance, security, and usability of the different options and use this evidence to elicit design and research recommendations. Our results show that it is possible to achieve Equal Error Rates as low as 7.2% (a reduction between 68–72% with respect to existing approaches) based on brain responses to images with current inexpensive technology. We show that the common practice of testing authentication systems only with known attacker data is unrealistic and may lead to overly optimistic evaluations. With regard to adoption, users call for simpler devices, faster authentication, and better privacy.
Exciting recent advances in genome sequencing, coupled with greatly reduced storage and computation costs, make genomic testing increasingly accessible to individuals. Already today, one’s digitized DNA can be easily obtained from a sequencing lab and later used to conduct numerous tests by engaging with a testing facility. Due to the inherent sensitivity of genetic material and the often-proprietary nature of genomic tests, privacy is a natural and crucial issue. While genomic privacy received a great deal of attention within and outside the research community, genomic security has not been sufficiently studied. This is surprising since the usage of fake or altered genomes can have grave consequences, such as erroneous drug prescriptions and genetic test outcomes.
Unfortunately, in the genomic domain, privacy and security (as often happens) are at odds with each other. In this article, we attempt to reconcile security with privacy in genomic testing by designing a novel technique for a secure and private genomic range query protocol between a genomic testing facility and an individual user. The proposed technique ensures authenticity and completeness of user-supplied genomic material while maintaining its privacy by releasing only the minimum thereof. To confirm its broad usability, we show how to apply the proposed technique to a previously proposed genomic private substring matching protocol. Experiments show that the proposed technique offers good performance and is quite practical. Furthermore, we generalize the genomic range query problem to sparse integer sets and discuss potential use cases.