DeviceWatch: A Data-Driven Network Analysis Approach to Identifying Compromised Mobile Devices with Graph-Inference
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
We propose to identify compromised mobile devices from a network administrator’s point of view. Intuitively, inadvertent users (and thus their devices) who download apps through untrustworthy markets are often lured to install malicious apps through in-app advertisements or phishing. We thus hypothesize that devices sharing similar apps would have a similar likelihood of being compromised, resulting in an association between a compromised device and its apps. We propose to leverage such associations to identify unknown compromised devices using the guilt-by-association principle. Admittedly, such associations could be relatively weak as it is hard, if not impossible, for an app to automatically download and install other apps without explicit user initiation. We describe how we can magnify such associations by carefully choosing parameters when applying graph-based inferences. We empirically evaluate the effectiveness of our approach on real datasets provided by a major mobile service provider. Specifically, we show that our approach achieves nearly 98% AUC (area under the ROC curve) and further detects as many as 6 ~ 7 times of new compromised devices not covered by the ground truth by expanding the limited knowledge on known devices. We show that the newly detected devices indeed present undesirable behavior in terms of leaking private information and accessing risky IPs and domains. We further conduct in-depth analysis of the effectiveness of graph inferences to understand the unique structure of the associations between mobile devices and their apps, and its impact on graph inferences, based on which we propose how to choose key parameters.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it