Researchers Beat Google's Bouncer

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An anonymous reader writes "When earlier this year Google introduced Bouncer -- an automated app scanning service that analyzes apps by running them on Google's cloud infrastructure and simulating how they will run on an Android device -- it shared practically nothing about how it operates, in the hopes of making malicious app developers' scramble for a while to discover how to bypass it. As it turned out, several months later security researchers Jon Oberheide and Charlie Miller discovered -- among other things -- just what kind of virtual environment Bouncer uses (the QEMU processor emulator) and that all requests coming from Google came from a specific IP block, and made an app that was instructed to behave as a legitimate one every time it detected this specific virtual environment. Now two more researchers have effectively proved that Bouncer can be rather easily fooled into considering a malicious app harmless."

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