TFE-GNN: A Temporal Fusion Encoder Using Graph Neural Networks for Fine-grained Encrypted Traffic ClassificationHaozhen Zhang, Le Yu, Xi Xiao et al.
Encrypted traffic classification is receiving widespread attention from researchers and industrial companies. However, the existing methods only extract flow-level features, failing to handle short flows because of unreliable statistical properties, or treat the header and payload equally, failing to mine the potential correlation between bytes. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a byte-level traffic graph construction approach based on point-wise mutual information (PMI), and a model named Temporal Fusion Encoder using Graph Neural Networks (TFE-GNN) for feature extraction. In particular, we design a dual embedding layer, a GNN-based traffic graph encoder as well as a cross-gated feature fusion mechanism, which can first embed the header and payload bytes separately and then fuses them together to obtain a stronger feature representation. The experimental results on two real datasets demonstrate that TFE-GNN outperforms multiple state-of-the-art methods in fine-grained encrypted traffic classification tasks.
12.8SEJul 19, 2020Code
STAN: Towards Describing Bytecodes of Smart ContractXiaoqi Li, Ting Chen, Xiapu Luo et al.
More than eight million smart contracts have been deployed into Ethereum, which is the most popular blockchain that supports smart contract. However, less than 1% of deployed smart contracts are open-source, and it is difficult for users to understand the functionality and internal mechanism of those closed-source contracts. Although a few decompilers for smart contracts have been recently proposed, it is still not easy for users to grasp the semantic information of the contract, not to mention the potential misleading due to decompilation errors. In this paper, we propose the first system named STAN to generate descriptions for the bytecodes of smart contracts to help users comprehend them. In particular, for each interface in a smart contract, STAN can generate four categories of descriptions, including functionality description, usage description, behavior description, and payment description, by leveraging symbolic execution and NLP (Natural Language Processing) techniques. Extensive experiments show that STAN can generate adequate, accurate, and readable descriptions for contract's bytecodes, which have practical value for users.
15.7SEAug 13, 2020
An Empirical Evaluation of GDPR Compliance Violations in Android mHealth AppsMing Fan, Le Yu, Sen Chen et al.
The purpose of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is to provide improved privacy protection. If an app controls personal data from users, it needs to be compliant with GDPR. However, GDPR lists general rules rather than exact step-by-step guidelines about how to develop an app that fulfills the requirements. Therefore, there may exist GDPR compliance violations in existing apps, which would pose severe privacy threats to app users. In this paper, we take mobile health applications (mHealth apps) as a peephole to examine the status quo of GDPR compliance in Android apps. We first propose an automated system, named \mytool, to bridge the semantic gap between the general rules of GDPR and the app implementations by identifying the data practices declared in the app privacy policy and the data relevant behaviors in the app code. Then, based on \mytool, we detect three kinds of GDPR compliance violations, including the incompleteness of privacy policy, the inconsistency of data collections, and the insecurity of data transmission. We perform an empirical evaluation of 796 mHealth apps. The results reveal that 189 (23.7\%) of them do not provide complete privacy policies. Moreover, 59 apps collect sensitive data through different measures, but 46 (77.9\%) of them contain at least one inconsistent collection behavior. Even worse, among the 59 apps, only 8 apps try to ensure the transmission security of collected data. However, all of them contain at least one encryption or SSL misuse. Our work exposes severe privacy issues to raise awareness of privacy protection for app users and developers.