A Survey on Security for Mobile Devices

Abstract

Nowadays, mobile devices are an important part of our everyday lives since they enable us to access a large variety of ubiquitous services. In recent years, the availability of these ubiquitous and mobile services has significantly increased due to the different form of connectivity provided by mobile devices, such as GSM, GPRS, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. In the same trend, the number and typologies of vulnerabilities exploiting these services and communication channels have increased as well. Therefore, smartphones may now represent an ideal target for malware writers. As the number of vulnerabilities and, hence, of attacks increase, there has been a corresponding rise of security solutions proposed by researchers. Due to the fact that this research field is immature and still unexplored in depth, with this paper we aim to provide a structured and comprehensive overview of the research on security solutions for mobile devices. This paper surveys the state of the art on threats, vulnerabilities and security solutions over the period 2004-2011. We focus on high-level attacks, such those to user applications, through SMS/MMS, denial-of-service, overcharging and privacy. We group existing approaches aimed at protecting mobile devices against these classes of attacks into different categories, based upon the detection principles, architectures, collected data and operating systems, especially focusing on IDS-based models and tools. With this categorization we aim to provide an easy and concise view of the underlying model adopted by each approach.

A Systematic Evaluation of Mobile Applications for Instant Messaging on iOS Devices

“…Since sensitive information travels over insecure channels [60,61], privacy policies and security methods should be provided to make the app reliable and trusted. Moreover, given the lack of security knowledge of the users [60] and similar to security icons on mobile web-browsers [62], information about security and privacy methods used by the app should be provided to the user.…”

Formal Analysis of Android's Permission-Based Security Model

“…Existing smartphone security surveys review the state of the art regarding popular mobile OS platforms [46,41]. In particular, La Polla et al [41] surveyed smartphone security threats and their solutions for the period 2004-2011, but has very limited coverage of Android.…”

“…In particular, La Polla et al [41] surveyed smartphone security threats and their solutions for the period 2004-2011, but has very limited coverage of Android. In the survey papers [29,42,47] the authors focus on the Android platform, but they only perform an informal analysis of the security model.…”

ApkCombiner: Combining Multiple Android Apps to Support Inter-App Analysis

“…More recently, static analysis techniques have also been applied for dissecting Android applications [9,12,14]. However, we note that current approaches still present a number of limitations when they are targeted to code from the Android system.…”