Authorship Attribution of Android Apps
Hugo Gonzalez, Natalia Stakhanova, Ali Akbar Ghorbani · 2018
Since the first computer virus hit the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) in the early 1970s, the security community interest revolved around ways to expose the identities of malware writers. Knowledge of the adversarial identities promised additional leverage to security experts in their ongoing battle against those perpetrators. At the dawn of computing era, when malware writers and malicious software were characterized by the lack of experience and relative simplicity, the task of uncovering the identities of virus writers was more or less straightforward. Manual analysis of source code often revealed personal, identifiable information embedded by authors themselves. But these times have long gone. Modern day's malware writers extensively use numerous malware code generators to mass produce new variants and employ advanced obfuscation techniques to hide their identities. As a result the work of security experts trying to uncover the identities of malware writers became significantly more challenging and time consuming.