Seminar by Anand Kashyap
Mobility without Vulnerability
Anand Kashyap
Symantec Research Labs, Pune
Date: Tuesday, February 27th, 2013
Time: 6PM
Venue: CS101.Abstract:
We live in the post PC era where we have seen an exponential growth in the proliferation of smartphones and tablets. These mobile devices have revolutionized the way we interact with computers, and have presented unique challenges in terms of security and privacy. The sandboxed architecture of most mobile operating systems, and the use of marketplaces for distribution of apps, has led to a shift in the security paradigm from system security to information security. Companies like Symantec are increasingly worried about protecting user data as it is tightly coupled with their devices and the apps they use, rather than mobile malware.
In this talk, I will present two projects that we have worked on in the space of mobile security: "Detecting Android Grayware", and "Detecting SMS spam". Mobile grayware consist of apps which exhibit a suspicious behavior, but clearly declare their intent on the marketplace. It is important to distinguish them from malware because grayware may be acceptable to some users and should not be blocked. SMS spam is an important problem for carriers as it directly impacts their revenue stream. Unlike email spam, SMS spams are hard to detect because they are very short and their prevalence is very low. We have built a content based classifier with a high spam detection rate and a small false positive rate.
About the speaker:
Anand Kashyap is a Researcher in the Core Research group of Symantec Research Labs in Pune, India. His current research is in the area of mobile security. Earlier, he worked extensively in the area of wireless networking, and built models for estimating interference in WiFi networks in his doctoral thesis. Anand received his B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Kanpur in 2002 and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stony Brook University in 2008. He has done research internships at NEC Labs and Microsoft Research, and has worked as an R&D engineer at Tejas Networks.