NEMESYS: Enhanced Network Security for Seamless Service Provisioning in the Smart Mobile Ecosystem

Abstract

As a consequence of the growing popularity of smart mobile devices, mobile malware is clearly on the rise, with attackers targeting valuable user information and exploiting vulnerabilities of the mobile ecosystems. With the emergence of large-scale mobile botnets, smartphones can also be used to launch attacks on mobile networks. The NEMESYS project will develop novel security technologies for seamless service provisioning in the smart mobile ecosystem, and improve mobile network security through better understanding of the threat landscape. NEMESYS will gather and analyze information about the nature of cyber-attacks targeting mobile users and the mobile network so that appropriate counter-measures can be taken. We will develop a data collection infrastructure that incorporates virtualized mobile honeypots and a honeyclient, to gather, detect and provide early warning of mobile attacks and better understand the modus operandi of cyber-criminals that target mobile devices. By correlating the extracted information with the known patterns of attacks from wireline networks, we will reveal and identify trends in the way that cyber-criminals launch attacks against mobile devices.

Towards Oblivious Network Analysis using Generative Adversarial Networks

“…Protocol reverse engineering tools: Similar to our proposed use case, prior works (e.g., [4,14,15]) have looked at inferring format of unknown protocols given network traces. For instance, PIP [4] uses bioinformatics algorithms [28,29,37] to perform alignment of message bits.…”

“…Prior work on uncovering the security implications of systems (e.g., [8,15,34]) assume a baseline level of knowledge about internal workings, protocol formats and/or an access to code or binaries. These assumptions do not hold for black-box devices.…”

Research and Innovation Action for the Security of the Internet of Things: The SerIoT Project

“…With IoT's arrival, EU industry, homes and society are catapulted into the huge arena of security risks that accompany an untested yet already universal technology that directly manages our cyber-physical reality on a daily, and indeed second by second, way beyond the security issues that are faced by mobile telephony [2,20,21], by the early machine to machine systems [1,42] or by software systems [15,16,22,25].…”

Signalling storms in 3G mobile networks

“…The approach we take is based on the development of a mathematical model of user signalling behaviour from which we derive some useful analytical results. While the literature [23]- [25] has focused on analysing signalling behaviour from an energy consumption perspective, we hope that this work can offer to mobile operators a greater understanding of bottlenecks and vulnerabilities in the radio signalling system, so that network parameters may be modified so as to mitigate for those effects that lead to network outages [26], [27].…”