Friday, December 18 was an amazing day for me when it comes to research — I got two papers accepted for publication! One of the papers was a never-ending nightmare I couldn’t get rid of, while the other paper was a first-time submission that got accepted right away.
The first paper is titled “Evaluation of Android Malware Detection Based on System Calls”. It’s a line of work that started two years ago as a class project when Simone Atzeni, my lab mate, and I were taking a class in machine learning. We decided to do a project on detecting malicious apps in Android using system call traces and machine learning to discriminate malicious from benign apps. The project was promising, so we extended it and got our (co)advisor and Ivo Ugrina on board. Finally, in its fourth edition this work got accepted for publication at the 2nd International Workshop on Security And Privacy Analytics (IWSPA). I will be traveling to New Orleans in March 2016 to present the work. If you are interested, the paper’s underlying tool maline is available online.
The other paper is “JDart: A Dynamic Symbolic Analysis Framework”. It is a tool paper on a symbolic (concolic) execution tool for Java. I am really happy with this tool as NASA, where the tool originates from, finally decided to make it free software! As a matter of fact, both JDart and all its dependencies are free software now (as long as you discard optional proprietary SMT solvers it can work with). As a side note, JDart is a dependency for my tool JDoop. This work is with folks from the NASA Ames Research Center and the Carnegie Mellon University, Silicon Valley Campus (and with folks that were there at some point). The paper got accepted for publication at the 22nd International Conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems (TACAS). The conference will take place in April 2016 in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. It’s unlikely I’ll be there.
Now onto the easiest part of publishing papers — polishing the two papers to get them camera-ready!