Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

11-2020

Abstract

Android as an operating system is now increasingly being adopted in industrial information systems, especially with Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). This also puts Android devices onto the front line of handling security-related data and conducting sensitive behaviors, which could be misused by the increasing number of polymorphic and metamorphic malicous applications targeting the platform. The existence of such malware threats therefore call for more accurate identification and surveillance of sensitive Android app behaviors, which is essential to the security of CPS and IoT devices powered by Android. Nevertheless, achieving dynamic app behavior monitoring and identification on real CPS powered by Android is challenging because of restrictions from the security and privacy model of the platform. In this paper, the authors investigate how the latest advances in deep learning could address this security problem with better accuracy. Specifically, a deep learning engine is proposed which detects sensitive app behaviors by classifying patterns of system-wide statistics, such as available storage space and transmitted packet volume, using a customized deep neural network based on existing models called Encoder and ResNet. Meanwhile, to handle resource limitations on typical CPS and IoT devices, sparse learning is adopted to reduce the amount of valid parameters in the trained neural network. Evaluations show that the proposed model outperforms a well established group of baselines on time series classification in identifying sensitive app behaviors with background noise and the targeted behaviors potentially overlapping.

Keywords

Industrial Information Systems, cyber-physical systems, behavior surveillance, artificial intelligence, Android applications

Discipline

Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics

First Page

1

Last Page

10

ISSN

1551-3203

Identifier

10.1109/TII.2020.3038745

Publisher

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/TII.2020.3038745

Share

COinS