Reassessing Android Malware Analysis: From Apps to IoT System Modelling

Applications based on the Internet of Things (IoT) are increasingly vulnerable to disruption from cyber attacks. Developers and researchers attempt to prevent the growth of such disruption models, mitigate and limit their impact. This requires the understanding and characterization of things and the technologies that empower the IoT. Futhermore, tools to evaluate, analyze and detect security threats in IoT devices are strongly required. This paper presents a web tool, named GARMDROID, aimed to help IoT software developers and integrators to evaluate IoT security threats based on the visualization of Android application hardware requests. This procedure is based on the static analysis of permissions requested by Android applications. A mapping from the malware analysis data obtained to a SysML block definition diagram is also briefly described. This mapping shows how data can be used to model IoT systems under different proposals such as Model Integrated Mechatronics (MIM) and UML4IoT. Received on 23 November 2016; accepted on 21 September 2017; published on 15 January 2018