Google Play Protect’s suite of mobile threat protections is built into more than 2 billion Android devices, automatically taking action in the background. To support this user-visible protection, a range of cloud-based analyses are performed. In this talk, I will discuss some of the techniques used for the detection of potentially harmful applications, focusing on how the challenges of large-scale program analysis differ from what is commonly seen in the research literature.
Damien Octeau is a Senior Software Engineer at Google, where he leads projects utilizing artificial intelligence for the detection of potentially harmful Android applications. He received the BSc and master’s degrees from Ecole Centrale de Lyon, France, in 2007 and 2010, respectively, and the MSc and PhD degrees in computer science and engineering from the Pennsylvania State University, in 2010 and 2014, respectively. He was a research associate with a joint appointment at the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University. His research interests include systems, mobile and software security, machine learning and program analysis.