Date of Award

2013

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Committee Chair

David J. Coe

Committee Member

Jeff Kulick

Committee Member

Earl Wells

Subject(s)

Computer networks--Security measures, Software protection, Data encryption (Computer science), Computer viruses

Abstract

This work uses salience testing techniques to identify the best performance counter events for detecting malware on Android devices. Modifications were made to a Linux kernel module to enable monitoring and logging of performance counter events. Numerous experiments combining different performance counter events were conducted, and a variety of data aggregation and classification techniques were evaluated. Experiment results were analyzed as to determine how well certain combinations of performance counter events classify applications as malware or non-malware. Results indicate that there are combinations of performance counter events that do much better at detecting malware than those presented in prior work.

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