Analyzing application private information leaks with privacy Petri Net

Private information leak has been discovered in many applications and has become serious and challenging problem to cyber security. Previous works are based on two categories of road map, the one focuses on the outbound network traffic of application, the other one dives into the inside information flow of application. We incorporate application dynamic behavior analysis with network traffic analysis and present abstract model called Privacy Petri Net (PPN) which is more applicable to various applications and more meaningful to users. We apply our approach on both real world regular application and malware. The experiment result shows that our approach can effectively find categories, content, source and destination of the private information leaks for the target application.