EMMA: A New Platform to Evaluate Hardware-based Mobile Malware Analyses
This provides a rigorous foundation for evaluating HMDs, which are crucial for building trustworthy mobile computing platforms, though it is incremental as it builds on existing HMD technology.
The paper tackles the problem of evaluating hardware-based malware detectors (HMDs) for mobile platforms by introducing EMMA, a platform that deconstructs malware into atomic actions and tests HMDs against malware hidden in benign applications, resulting in HMD algorithms that perform 24.7% better than prior work.
Hardware-based malware detectors (HMDs) are a key emerging technology to build trustworthy computing platforms, especially mobile platforms. Quantifying the efficacy of HMDs against malicious adversaries is thus an important problem. The challenge lies in that real-world malware typically adapts to defenses, evades being run in experimental settings, and hides behind benign applications. Thus, realizing the potential of HMDs as a line of defense - that has a small and battery-efficient code base - requires a rigorous foundation for evaluating HMDs. To this end, we introduce EMMA - a platform to evaluate the efficacy of HMDs for mobile platforms. EMMA deconstructs malware into atomic, orthogonal actions and introduces a systematic way of pitting different HMDs against a diverse subset of malware hidden inside benign applications. EMMA drives both malware and benign programs with real user-inputs to yield an HMD's effective operating range - i.e., the malware actions a particular HMD is capable of detecting. We show that small atomic actions, such as stealing a Contact or SMS, have surprisingly large hardware footprints, and use this insight to design HMD algorithms that are less intrusive than prior work and yet perform 24.7% better. Finally, EMMA brings up a surprising new result - obfuscation techniques used by malware to evade static analyses makes them more detectable using HMDs.