Late-Stage Software Feature Reduction Tool for Security and Performance

Smartphones have become ubiquitous; a facet of everyday life for most people. Due to increasing computational power, these devices are used to perform a large number of tasks, from personal email to corporate expense account management. we plan to employ a holistic analysis approach that will extend existing static and dynamic analysis techniques augmenting them with our own forced path execution technology [15]. Thus, we aim to combine static, dynamic, and forced-path analysis in order to maximize code coverage. The proposed approach enables the framework to address the program analysis shortcomings of each approach when they are used in isolation. We plan to leverage code pruning techniques to selectively remove application functionality to restrict access without causing the program to terminate and in a manner that is not disruptive, whenever possible. The selective removal of application code enables a system operator or a user to make the applications conform to a customizable security policy. We plan to address novel and recurrent evasion techniques employed by applications to hide and subdue their behavior when under analysis. Our goal is to be able to fully parse Java, Javascript, and native ARM code achieving full coverage and thus, full code feature reduction capabilities.