CSIS Seminar

Challenges in Android Security

Abstract

This presentation is about current challenges in Android security. The challenges, spanning from ML to traditional program analysis techniques to building secure devices, are introduced with an explanation of why they’re difficult and how they could be approached. The speaker’s hope is that students and faculty find these challenges interesting and may want to pursue them in collaboration with Google.

Speaker Bio

Sebastian is the manager of Google’s Android Malware Research team, a team that explores upcoming, persistent, or just plain dangerous Android malware threats. The team’s work involves reverse engineering of apps, building static and dynamic analysis tools, investigating malware developers, and working with many partner teams inside and outside Google to protect Android users from any malware threats they may face. Before joining this team in 2011, Sebastian worked as a vulnerability researcher and software engineer of reverse engineering tools for vulnerability research and malware analysis. He is also the co-author of the 2023 “The Android Malware Handbook - Detection and Analysis by Human and Machine” which explains Android malware, how to analyze it, and how to detect it with Machine Learning. Sebastian holds B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Computer Science from Trier University of Applied Sciences, Germany.