Silvia Lucia Sanna

Silvia Lucia Sanna, Massimo Palozzi, Leonardo Regano et al.

Android malware analysis is currently facing increasing challenges in achieving robust classification and detecting stealth attacks. Modern threats employ advanced evasion strategies such as code obfuscation, dynamic loading, packing, and even steganographic manipulation of traditional static and dynamic features. These techniques reduce the effectiveness of signature-based systems and degrade the reliability of Machine Learning models that depend on explicit semantic indicators such as permissions, API calls, or control-flow structures. In this work, we propose \approachname, a memory forensics malware detection framework that shifts the analysis perspective from semantic program modeling to signal-based structural representation. Both static bytecode and early-execution memory snapshots are transformed into audio waveforms through direct binary-to-waveform mapping, preserving low-level structural patterns without requiring disassembly or feature engineering. The resulting signals are processed using handcrafted spectral descriptors, Convolutional Neural Networks, and transformer-based embeddings. Experiments on CICMalDroid2020 dataset and VirusTotal malware demonstrate that \approachname achieves up to 98.0\% accuracy, outperforming static sonification and competitive state-of-the-art approaches.

Silvia Lucia Sanna, Leonardo Regano, Davide Maiorca et al.

Nowadays, many tools are used to facilitate forensic tasks about data extraction and data analysis. In particular, some tools leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) to automatically label examined data into specific categories (\ie, drugs, weapons, nudity). However, this raises a serious concern about the robustness of the employed AI algorithms against adversarial attacks. Indeed, some people may need to hide specific data to AI-based digital forensics tools, thus manipulating the content so that the AI system does not recognize the offensive/prohibited content and marks it at as suspicious to the analyst. This could be seen as an anti-forensics attack scenario. For this reason, we analyzed two of the most important forensics tools employing AI for data classification: Magnet AI, used by Magnet Axiom, and Excire Photo AI, used by X-Ways Forensics. We made preliminary tests using about $200$ images, other $100$ sent in $3$ chats about pornography and teenage nudity, drugs and weapons to understand how the tools label them. Moreover, we loaded some deepfake images (images generated by AI forging real ones) of some actors to understand if they would be classified in the same category as the original images. From our preliminary study, we saw that the AI algorithm is not robust enough, as we expected since these topics are still open research problems. For example, some sexual images were not categorized as nudity, and some deepfakes were categorized as the same real person, while the human eye can see the clear nudity image or catch the difference between the deepfakes. Building on these results and other state-of-the-art works, we provide some suggestions for improving how digital forensics analysis tool leverage AI and their robustness against adversarial attacks or different scenarios than the trained one.

Silvia Lucia Sanna, Diego Soi, Davide Maiorca et al.

Nowadays, the Internet of Things (IoT) is widely employed, and its usage is growing exponentially because it facilitates remote monitoring, predictive maintenance, and data-driven decision making, especially in the healthcare and industrial sectors. However, IoT devices remain vulnerable due to their resource constraints and difficulty in applying security patches. Consequently, various cybersecurity attacks are reported daily, such as Denial of Service, particularly in IoT-driven solutions. Most attack detection methodologies are based on Machine Learning (ML) techniques, which can detect attack patterns. However, the focus is more on identification rather than considering the impact of ML algorithms on computational resources. This paper proposes a green methodology to identify IoT malware networking attacks based on flow privacy-preserving statistical features. In particular, the hyperparameters of three tree-based models -- Decision Trees, Random Forest and Extra-Trees -- are optimized based on energy consumption and test-time performance in terms of Matthew's Correlation Coefficient. Our results show that models maintain high performance and detection accuracy while consistently reducing power usage in terms of watt-hours (Wh). This suggests that on-premise ML-based Intrusion Detection Systems are suitable for IoT and other resource-constrained devices.