SmartSiren: virus detection and alert for smartphones

Smartphones have recently become increasingly popular because they provide "all-in-one" convenience by integrating traditional mobile phones with handheld computing devices. However, the flexibility of running third-party softwares also leaves the smartphones open to malicious viruses. In fact, hundreds of smartphone viruses have emerged in the past two years, which can quickly spread through various means such as SMS/MMS, Bluetooth and traditional IP-based applications. Our own implementations of two proof-of-concept viruses on Windows Mobile have confirmed the vulnerability of this popular smartphone platform. In this paper, we present SmartSiren, a collaborative virus detection and alert system for smartphones. In order to detect viruses, SmartSiren collects the communication activity information from the smartphones, and performs joint analysis to detect both single-device and system-wide abnormal behaviors. We use a proxy-based architecture to offload the processing bur...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: MOBISYS
• Authors: Jerry Cheng, Starsky H. Y. Wong, Hao Yang, Songwu Lu
• Keywords: MOBISYS 2007, Popular Smartphone Platform, Resource-constrained Smartphones, Smartphone Viruses, Wireless Networks