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As the number of Internet of Thing (IoT) devices increases, attacks against their vulnerabilities have become a serious threat. The web servers (WSs) in IoT devices provide management services for end-users, which are currently the major attack surface. Several fuzzing solutions for identifying vulnerabilities in IoT devices have been proposed, but there is currently no grey-box fuzzer specifically designed for the unique features of WSs in IoT to effectively detect memory corruption vulnerabilities. We design and implement KVFL, an efficient grey-box fuzzer, to address the issues of low throughput and slow exploration of deep code when fuzzing for IoT WSs. Firstly, KVFL employs a delicate hooking technology that heuristically hijacks and emulates hardware-dependent functions, ensuring WSs can be accurately and efficiently emulated in user-mode. On this basis, KVFL fully utilizes the loop parsing HTTP requests feature of WSs through a redesigned fork-server, to minimize nonessential rebooting losses of the target, thereby significantly improving fuzzing throughput. Secondly, KVFL leverages code coverage feedback to automatically infer a set of valid Keys and derive a Key-Value mutation. This enables the generation of high-quality test cases that can facilitate deeper code exploration of WSs. The evaluation results show that compared to the state-of-the-art IoT grey-box fuzzer FIRM-AFL, KVFL improves the throughput by over 2× and explores 4.5× more edges. Additionally, it identifies all 1-day vulnerabilities with over 7× faster speed than the baseline and detects three previously unknown 0-day vulnerabilities. These all indicate that KVFL is effective and efficient at fuzzing IoT WSs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, we witnessed a drastic increase of ransomware, especially on popular mobile platforms including Android. Ransomware extorts victims for a sum of money by taking control of their devices or files. In light of their rapid growth, there is a pressing need to develop effective countermeasure solutions. However, the research community is still constrained by the lack of a comprehensive data set, and there exists no insightful understanding of mobile ransomware in the wild. In this paper, we focus on the Android platform and aim to characterize existing Android ransomware. Specifically, we have managed to collect 2,721 ransomware samples that cover the majority of existing Android ransomware families. Based on these samples, we systematically characterize them from several aspects, including timeline and malicious features. In addition, the detection results of existing anti-virus tools are rather disappointing, which clearly calls for customized anti-mobile-ransomware solutions. To detect ransomware that extorts users by encrypting data, we propose a novel real-time detection system, called RansomProber. By analyzing the user interface widgets of related activities and the coordinates of users’ finger movements, RansomProber can infer whether the file encryption operations are initiated by users. The experimental results show that RansomProber can effectively detect encrypting ransomware with high accuracy and acceptable runtime performance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]