Complex Events Monitoring and Detection on Android (CEMDA) Project

About CEMDA

Complex file events were first proposed by Etamar Laron (CEO, Asparna) in US Patent 9418070B2 as part of a novel system for file monitoring and revision control.

Complex file events offer a way for devices to treat files more intelligently. They act as a bridge between the device-level events that file systems and operating systems see and the high-level user actions that people perform on files. Complex file events are an Asparna core technology and serve as the foundation for many of its innovations.

CEMDA is a system that brings file lifecycle analysis and complex file events to Android. You can read about CEMDA in our papers:

• Michael J May, Yaakov Cohen, Hovav Menachem, and Yogev Swisa. 2023. CEMDA: Preserving the User’s Mental Model on Android Files Using Complex Events. SIGAPP Applied Computing Review 22, 4 (December 2022), 24–36. [doi]
• Michael J. May, Yaakov Cohen, Hovav Menachem, Yogev Swissa. 2022 CEMDA: Detecting Android Complex File Events to Infer the User’s Mental Model). Proceedings of the 37th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium On Applied Computing (SAC ’22). April 2022. [doi]

We published two other papers on the topic of complex events and file lifecycle analysis. They set out the theory for complex file events and show how they can be used to improve application performance and fight ransomware attacks:

• Michael J. May, Etamar Laron, Khalid Zoabi, and Havah Gerhardt. 2019. On the Lifecycle of the File. ACM Transactions on Storage 15, 1, Article 1 (February 2019), 45 pages. [doi][pdf]
• Michael J. May and Etamar Laron. Combatting Ransomware Using Content Analysis and Complex File Events. IFIP International Conference on New Technologies, Mobility, and Security, 2019.doi

People

Michael J. May, Primary Investigator

Kobi Cohen, Hovav Menachem, Yogev Swissa Student Investigators

Materials: Online supplement

Our paper on CEMDA appeared in the ACM SIG APP Symposium on Applied Computer (SAC) in April 2022. Due to space restrictions, we were unable to include all of the complex event definitions developed. The definitions for Android 8 and 9 were therefore moved to an online supplement that can be found here.