Skip to main content
USENIX
  • Conferences
  • Students
Sign in
  • Home
  • Attend
    • Registration Information
    • Registration Discounts
    • Venue, Hotel, and Travel
    • Students and Grants
    • Co-located Workshops
  • Program
    • At a Glance
    • Technical Sessions
  • Activities
    • Birds-of-a-Feather Sessions
    • Poster Session
    • Work-in-Progress Reports (WiPs)
  • Sponsorship
  • Participate
    • Instructions for Authors and Speakers
    • Call for Papers
      • Important Dates
      • Symposium Organizers
      • Symposium Topics
      • Refereed Papers
      • Symposium Activities
      • Submitting Papers
  • About
    • Symposium Organizers
    • Questions
    • Services
    • Help Promote
    • Past Symposia
  • Home
  • Attend
  • Program
  • Activities
  • Sponsorship
  • Participate
  • About

sponsors

Platinum Sponsor
Gold Sponsor
Silver Sponsor
Silver Sponsor
Silver Sponsor
Silver Sponsor
Bronze Sponsor
Bronze Sponsor
Media Sponsor
Media Sponsor
Media Sponsor
Media Sponsor
Media Sponsor
Media Sponsor
Media Sponsor
Media Sponsor
Industry Partner
Industry Partner

help promote

USENIX Security '16 button

Get more
Help Promote graphics!

connect with usenix


  •  Twitter
  •  Facebook
  •  LinkedIn
  •  Google+
  •  YouTube

twitter

Tweets by USENIXSecurity

usenix conference policies

  • Event Code of Conduct
  • Conference Network Policy
  • Statement on Environmental Responsibility Policy

You are here

Home » Screen after Previous Screens: Spatial-Temporal Recreation of Android App Displays from Memory Images
Tweet

connect with us

Screen after Previous Screens: Spatial-Temporal Recreation of Android App Displays from Memory Images

Authors: 

Brendan Saltaformaggio, Rohit Bhatia, Xiangyu Zhang, and Dongyan Xu, Purdue University; Golden G. Richard III, University of New Orleans

Abstract: 

Smartphones are increasingly involved in cyber and real world crime investigations. In this paper, we demonstrate a powerful smartphone memory forensics technique, called RetroScope, which recovers multiple previous screens of an Android app — in the order they were displayed — from the phone’s memory image. Different from traditional memory forensics, RetroScope enables spatial-temporal forensics, revealing the progression of the phone user’s interactions with the app (e.g., a banking transaction, online chat, or document editing session). RetroScope achieves near perfect accuracy in both the recreation and ordering of reconstructed screens. Further, RetroScope is app-agnostic, requiring no knowledge about an app’s internal data definitions or rendering logic. RetroScope is inspired by the observations that (1) app-internal data on previous screens exists much longer in memory than the GUI data structures that “package” them and (2) each app is able to perform context-free redrawing of its screens upon command from the Android framework. Based on these, RetroScope employs a novel interleaved re-execution engine to selectively reanimate an app’s screen redrawing functionality from within a memory image. Our evaluation shows that RetroScope is able to recover full temporally-ordered sets of screens (each with 3 to 11 screens) for a variety of popular apps on a number of different Android devices.

Brendan Saltaformaggio, Purdue University

Rohit Bhatia, Purdue University

Xiangyu Zhang, Purdue University

Dongyan Xu, Purdue University

Golden G. Richard III, University of New Orleans

Open Access Media

USENIX is committed to Open Access to the research presented at our events. Papers and proceedings are freely available to everyone once the event begins. Any video, audio, and/or slides that are posted after the event are also free and open to everyone. Support USENIX and our commitment to Open Access.

Saltaformaggio PDF
View the slides

Presentation Video 

Presentation Audio

MP3 Download

Download Audio

  • Log in or    Register to post comments

Platinum Sponsors

Gold Sponsors

Silver Sponsors

Bronze Sponsors

Media Sponsors & Industry Partners

© USENIX

  • Privacy Policy
  • Contact Us