Combining Static Analysis with Probabilistic Models to Enable Market-Scale Analysis
Static analysis has been successfully used in many areas, from verifying mission-critical software to malware detection. Unfortunately, static analysis often produces false positives, which require significant manual effort to resolve. In this paper, we show how to overlay a probabilistic model, trained using domain knowledge, on top of static analysis results, in order to triage static analysis results. We apply this idea to analyzing mobile applications. Android application components can communicate with each other, both within single applications and between different applications. Unfortunately, techniques to statically infer Inter-Component Communication (ICC) yield many potential inter-component and inter- application links, most of which are false positives. At large scales, scrutinizing all potential links is simply not feasible. We therefore overlay a probabilistic model of ICC on top of static analysis results. Since computing the inter-component links is a prerequisite to inter-component analysis, we introduce a formalism for inferring ICC links based on set constraints. We design an efficient algorithm for performing link resolution. We compute all potential links in a corpus of 10,928 applications in 24 minutes and triage them using our probabilistic approach. We find that over 97.3% of all 489 million potential links are associated with probability values below 0.01 and are thus likely unfeasible links. Thus, it is possible to consider only a small subset of all links without significant loss of information. This work is the first significant step in making static inter-application analysis more tractable, even at large scales.
Thu 21 JanDisplayed time zone: Guadalajara, Mexico City, Monterrey change
14:20 - 16:00 | Track 1: Learning and verificationResearch Papers at Grand Bay North Chair(s): David Monniaux CNRS, VERIMAG | ||
14:20 25mTalk | Combining Static Analysis with Probabilistic Models to Enable Market-Scale Analysis Research Papers Damien Octeau University of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania State University, Somesh Jha University of Wisconsin, Madison, Matthew Dering Pennsylvania State University, Patrick McDaniel Pennsylvania State University, Alexandre Bartel Technical University Darmstadt, Hongyu Li Rice University, Jacques Klein University of Luxembourg, Yves Le Traon University of Luxembourg Media Attached | ||
14:45 25mTalk | Abstraction Refinement Guided by a Learnt Probabilistic Model Research Papers Media Attached | ||
15:10 25mTalk | Learning Invariants using Decision Trees and Implication Counterexamples Research Papers Pranav Garg University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Daniel Neider University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, P. Madhusudan University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Dan Roth University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Media Attached | ||
15:35 25mTalk | Symbolic Abstract Data Type Inference Research Papers Media Attached |