Boffins Build Automated Android Bug Hunting System

Researchers from Nanjing University and the University of Sydney developed an AI-powered bug-hunting agent that mimics human vulnerability discovery, validating flaws with proof-of-concept exploits. The Register reports: Ziyue Wang (Nanjing) and Liyi Zhou (Sydney) have expanded upon prior work dubbed A1, an AI agent that can develop exploits for cryptocurrency smart contracts, with A2, an AI agent capable of vulnerability discovery and validation in Android apps. They describe A2 in a preprint paper titled 'Agentic Discovery and Validation of Android App Vulnerabilities.'

The authors claim that the A2 system achieves 78.3 percent coverage on the Ghera benchmark, surpassing static analyzers like APKHunt (30.0 percent). And they say that, when they used A2 on 169 production APKs, they found '104 true-positive zero-day vulnerabilities,' 57 of which were self-validated via automatically generated proof-of-concept (PoC) exploits. One of these included a medium-severity flaw in an Android app with over 10 million installs.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.