arXiv subjects

Zhaoyi Meng

Publications and source records attributed to Zhaoyi Meng.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

TreeMind: Automatically Reproducing Android Bug Reports via LLM-empowered Monte Carlo Tree Search

Automatically reproducing Android app crashes from textual bug reports is challenging, particularly when the reports are incomplete and the modern UI exhibits high combinatorial complexity. Existing approaches based solely on reinforcement learning or large language models (LLMs) exhibit limitations in such scenarios. They struggle to infer unobserved steps and reconstruct the underlying user action sequences to navigate the vast UI interaction space, primarily due to limited goal-directed reasoning and planning. We present TreeMind, a novel technique that integrates LLMs with an adapted Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm to achieve strategic UI exploration in bug reproduction. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to combine external decision-making with LLM semantic reasoning for reliable and accurate reproduction processes. We formulate the reproduction task as a target-driven search problem, leveraging MCTS as the core planning mechanism to iteratively refine action sequences. To enhance MCTS with semantic reasoning, we introduce two LLM-guided agents with distinct roles: Expander generates top-k promising actions based on the current UI state and exploration history, while Simulator estimates the likelihood that each candidate action leads toward successful reproduction by additionally leveraging dynamic environment feedback. By incorporating multi-modal UI inputs and tailored prompting strategies, TreeMind performs feedback-aware navigation that identifies essential user actions and incrementally reconstructs reproduction paths. We evaluate TreeMind on a dataset of 93 real-world Android bug reports from three widely-used benchmarks. Experimental results show that it significantly outperforms four state-of-the-art baselines, including ReBL, ReActDroid, AdbGPT, and ReproBot, in reproduction success rate.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

JANUS: A Difference-Oriented Analyzer For Financial Centralization Risks in Smart Contracts

Some smart contracts violate decentralization principles by defining privileged accounts that manage other users' assets without permission, introducing centralization risks that have caused financial losses. Existing methods, however, face challenges in accurately detecting diverse centralization risks due to their dependence on predefined behavior patterns. In this paper, we propose JANUS, an automated analyzer for Solidity smart contracts that detects financial centralization risks independently of their specific behaviors. JANUS identifies differences between states reached by privileged and ordinary accounts, and analyzes whether these differences are finance-related. Focusing on the impact of risks rather than behaviors, JANUS achieves improved accuracy compared to existing tools and can uncover centralization risks with unknown patterns. To evaluate JANUS's performance, we compare it with other tools using a dataset of 540 contracts. Our evaluation demonstrates that JANUS outperforms representative tools in terms of detection accuracy for financial centralization risks . Additionally, we evaluate JANUS on a real-world dataset of 33,151 contracts, successfully identifying two types of risks that other tools fail to detect. We also prove that the state traversal method and variable summaries, which are used in JANUS to reduce the number of states to be compared, do not introduce false alarms or omissions in detection.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

MalFlows: Context-aware Fusion of Heterogeneous Flow Semantics for Android Malware Detection

Static analysis, a fundamental technique in Android app examination, enables the extraction of control flows, data flows, and inter-component communications (ICCs), all of which are essential for malware detection. However, existing methods struggle to leverage the semantic complementarity across different types of flows for representing program behaviors, and their context-unaware nature further hinders the accuracy of cross-flow semantic integration. We propose and implement MalFlows, a novel technique that achieves context-aware fusion of heterogeneous flow semantics for Android malware detection. Our goal is to leverage complementary strengths of the three types of flow-related information for precise app profiling. We adopt a heterogeneous information network (HIN) to model the rich semantics across these program flows. We further propose flow2vec, a context-aware HIN embedding technique that distinguishes the semantics of HIN entities as needed based on contextual constraints across different flows and learns accurate app representations through the joint use of multiple meta-paths. The representations are finally fed into a channel-attention-based deep neural network for malware classification. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to comprehensively aggregate the strengths of diverse flow-related information for assessing maliciousness within apps. We evaluate MalFlows on a large-scale dataset comprising over 20 million flow instances extracted from more than 31,000 real-world apps. Experimental results demonstrate that MalFlows outperforms representative baselines in Android malware detection, and meanwhile, validate the effectiveness of flow2vec in accurately learning app representations from the HIN constructed over the heterogeneous flows.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

WACANA: A Concolic Analyzer for Detecting On-chain Data Vulnerabilities in WASM Smart Contracts

WebAssembly (WASM) has emerged as a crucial technology in smart contract development for several blockchain platforms. Unfortunately, since their introduction, WASM smart contracts have been subject to several security incidents caused by contract vulnerabilities, resulting in substantial economic losses. However, existing tools for detecting WASM contract vulnerabilities have accuracy limitations, one of the main reasons being the coarse-grained emulation of the on-chain data APIs. In this paper, we introduce WACANA, an analyzer for WASM contracts that accurately detects vulnerabilities through fine-grained emulation of on-chain data APIs. WACANA precisely simulates both the structure of on-chain data tables and their corresponding API functions, and integrates concrete and symbolic execution within a coverage-guided loop to balance accuracy and efficiency. Evaluations on a vulnerability dataset of 133 contracts show WACANA outperforming state-of-the-art tools in accuracy. Further validation on 5,602 real-world contracts confirms WACANA's practical effectiveness.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

AppPoet: Large Language Model based Android malware detection via multi-view prompt engineering

Due to the vast array of Android applications, their multifarious functions and intricate behavioral semantics, attackers can adopt various tactics to conceal their genuine attack intentions within legitimate functions. However, numerous learning-based methods suffer from a limitation in mining behavioral semantic information, thus impeding the accuracy and efficiency of Android malware detection. Besides, the majority of existing learning-based methods are weakly interpretive and fail to furnish researchers with effective and readable detection reports. Inspired by the success of the Large Language Models (LLMs) in natural language understanding, we propose AppPoet, a LLM-assisted multi-view system for Android malware detection. Firstly, AppPoet employs a static method to comprehensively collect application features and formulate various observation views. Then, using our carefully crafted multi-view prompt templates, it guides the LLM to generate function descriptions and behavioral summaries for each view, enabling deep semantic analysis of the views. Finally, we collaboratively fuse the multi-view information to efficiently and accurately detect malware through a deep neural network (DNN) classifier and then generate the human-readable diagnostic reports. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves a detection accuracy of 97.15% and an F1 score of 97.21%, which is superior to the baseline methods. Furthermore, the case study evaluates the effectiveness of our generated diagnostic reports.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

Detecting Android Malware by Visualizing App Behaviors from Multiple Complementary Views

Deep learning has emerged as a promising technology for achieving Android malware detection. To further unleash its detection potentials, software visualization can be integrated for analyzing the details of app behaviors clearly. However, facing increasingly sophisticated malware, existing visualization-based methods, analyzing from one or randomly-selected few views, can only detect limited attack types. We propose and implement LensDroid, a novel technique that detects Android malware by visualizing app behaviors from multiple complementary views. Our goal is to harness the power of combining deep learning and software visualization to automatically capture and aggregate high-level features that are not inherently linked, thereby revealing hidden maliciousness of Android app behaviors. To thoroughly comprehend the details of apps, we visualize app behaviors from three related but distinct views of behavioral sensitivities, operational contexts and supported environments. We then extract high-order semantics based on the views accordingly. To exploit semantic complementarity of the views, we design a deep neural network based model for fusing the visualized features from local to global based on their contributions to downstream tasks. A comprehensive comparison with five baseline techniques is performed on datasets of more than 51K apps in three real-world typical scenarios, including overall threats, app evolution and zero-day malware. The experimental results show that the overall performance of LensDroid is better than the baseline techniques. We also validate the complementarity of the views and demonstrate that the multi-view fusion in LensDroid enhances Android malware detection.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

An Automated Analyzer for Financial Security of Ethereum Smart Contracts

At present, millions of Ethereum smart contracts are created per year and attract financially motivated attackers. However, existing analyzers do not meet the need to precisely analyze the financial security of large numbers of contracts. In this paper, we propose and implement FASVERIF, an automated analyzer for fine-grained analysis of smart contracts' financial security. On the one hand, FASVERIF automatically generates models to be verified against security properties of smart contracts. On the other hand, our analyzer automatically generates the security properties, which is different from existing formal verifiers for smart contracts. As a result, FASVERIF can automatically process source code of smart contracts, and uses formal methods whenever possible to simultaneously maximize its accuracy. We evaluate FASVERIF on a vulnerabilities dataset by comparing it with other automatic tools. Our evaluation shows that FASVERIF greatly outperforms the representative tools using different technologies, with respect to accuracy and coverage of types of vulnerabilities.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2020

AppAngio: Revealing Contextual Information of Android App Behaviors by API-Level Audit Logs

Android users are now suffering severe threats from unwanted behaviors of various apps. The analysis of apps' audit logs is one of the essential methods for some device manufacturers to unveil the underlying malice within apps. We propose and implement AppAngio, a novel system that reveals contextual information in Android app behaviors by API-level audit logs. Our goal is to help analysts of device manufactures understand what has happened on users' devices and facilitate the identification of the malice within apps. The key module of AppAngio is identifying the path matched with the logs on the app's control-flow graph (CFG). The challenge, however, is that the limited-quantity logs may incur high computational complexity in the log matching, where there are a large number of candidates caused by the coupling relation of successive logs. To address the challenge, we propose a divide and conquer strategy that precisely positions the nodes matched with log records on the corresponding CFGs and connects the nodes with as few backtracks as possible. Our experiments show that AppAngio reveals the contextual information of behaviors in real-world apps. Moreover, the revealed results assist the analysts in identifying malice of app behaviors and complement existing analysis schemes. Meanwhile, AppAngio incurs negligible performance overhead on the Android device.

cs.SE↗