Detecting broken security in hybrid Android apps (completed)

Many modern Android applications make use of a webview – a component providing easy access to the rendering engine and JavaScript interpreter of a full browser. The content shown by a webview can be loaded from a local resource or a remote server via HTTP and integrates seamlessly with the app. Webviews are popular with developers, … full description “Detecting broken security in hybrid Android apps (completed)”

Disassembling x86 binaries for static analysis and reverse engineering (completed)

The Jakstab static analyser for binaries automatically disassembles x86 binaries for Windows or Linux and reconstructs a control flow graph. It is particularly effective on targets that have been obfuscated with various tricks that throw off regular disassemblers such as IDA Pro. Jakstab disassembles one instruction at a time, translates it into an intermediate language, and then … full description “Disassembling x86 binaries for static analysis and reverse engineering (completed)”

Improving Automatic Bug Detection in JavaScript (completed)

Dynamic symbolic execution (DSE) is an effective tool for bug detection in real software. Like unit testing and fuzzing DSE executes portions of a program, exposing bugs through runtime program exceptions. In DSE, some inputs to the program under test are made “symbolic” while the rest are fixed. Whenever the symbolic execution encounters a conditional operation … full description “Improving Automatic Bug Detection in JavaScript (completed)”

Predicting Debug Symbols for Closed Source Binaries (completed)

Reverse engineering binaries, whether malicious or benign, is made more difficult by the absence of debug information. Variables and functions have had their identifiers “stripped”, so reverse engineers have to manually name them during analysis based on human understanding of the code functionality. The goal of this project is to use machine learning to predict … full description “Predicting Debug Symbols for Closed Source Binaries (completed)”

REST API and web frontend for a JavaScript symbolic testing framework (completed)

ExpoSE.js is a symbolic testing framework being developed at Royal Holloway designed to assist developers in improving the security and reliability of JavaScript applications, a language for which traditional software testing solutions have failed to produce satisfactory results. Symbolic execution is a technique which allows for the systematic enumeration of feasible paths of a program. … full description “REST API and web frontend for a JavaScript symbolic testing framework (completed)”