ICRI-SC research featured in MIT Technology Review

An arXiv research report based on the work being done at the "Malware Insights"
project at the department, has been featured in MIT Technology Review's
"Emerging Technology From the arXiv" section.
 
The project team, consisting of Hien Truong, Eemil Lagerspetz, Sourav
Bhattacharya, Petteri Nurmi, Sasu Tarkoma, and N. Asokan have been
investigating the true extent of malware infection in Android devices.  
Working with Adam J. Oliner from the UC Berkeley AMP Lab, they discovered
that infection rates in Android devices, though small, are still significantly higher
than previous independent estimates by other academic researchers. The project
instrumented the Carat application, developed by Eemil Lagerspetz and
Sasu Tarkoma in collaboration with AMP Lab, to collect anonymized data
from over 50 000 devices during a six-month period.
 
The researchers also speculated that smartphones infected with malicious
apps may have other, benign, apps in common, possibly because the users
purchase them all from the same app market. Based on this conjecture, the
researchers investigated if it is possible to develop a technique to identify
devices infected with previously unknown malware. In their dataset, this approach
is up to five times more likely to identify infected devices than by choosing devices
at random.
 
The Malware Insights project is part of the research being done at the Intel
Collaborative Research Institute for Secure Computing (ICRI-SC).
For further information about the project or ICRI-SC, contact
Prof. N. Asokan  (mailto:n.asokan@cs.helsinki.fi) or
Prof. Sasu Tarkoma (mailto:sasu.tarkoma@cs.helsinki.fi).