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CDRep: Automatic repair of cryptographic-misuses in Android applications
ASIA CCS '16: Proceedings of the 11th ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security: May 30 - June 3, Xi'an, China
  • Siqi MA, Singapore Management University
  • David LO, Singapore Management University
  • Teng LI
  • Robert H. DENG, Singapore Management University
Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
6-2016
Abstract

Cryptography is increasingly being used in mobile applications to provide various security services; from user authentication, data privacy, to secure communications. However, there are plenty of mistakes that developers could accidentally make when using cryptography in their mobile apps and such mistakes can lead to a false sense of security. Recent research efforts indeed show that a significant portion of mobile apps in both Android and iOS platforms misused cryptographic APIs. In this paper, we present CDRep, a tool for automatically repairing cryptographic misuse defects in Android apps. We classify such defects into seven types and manually assemble the corresponding fix patterns based on the best practices in cryptographic implementations. CDRep consists of two phases, a detection phase which identifies defect locations in a mobile app and a repair phase which repairs the vulnerable app automatically. In our validation, CDRep is able to successfully repair 94.5% of 1,262 vulnerable apps. Furthermore, CDRep is lightweight, the average runtime to generate a patch is merely 19.3 seconds and the size of a repaired app increases by only 0.667% on average.

Keywords
  • vulnerability detection,
  • cryptographic misuse,
  • automated program repair
ISBN
9781450342339
Identifier
10.1145/2897845.2897896
Publisher
ACM
City or Country
New York
Creative Commons License
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International
Additional URL
http://doi.org/10.1145/2897845.2897896
Citation Information
Siqi MA, David LO, Teng LI and Robert H. DENG. "CDRep: Automatic repair of cryptographic-misuses in Android applications" ASIA CCS '16: Proceedings of the 11th ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security: May 30 - June 3, Xi'an, China (2016) p. 711 - 722
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/robert-deng/189/