Overview

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 themselves 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 confrmed the vulnerability of this popular smartphone platform. In this project, we present SmartSiren, a collaborative virus detection and alert system for smartphones. 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 burden from resource-constrained smartphones and simplify the collaboration among smartphones. When a potential virus is detected, the proxy quarantines the outbreak by sending targeted alerts to those immediately threatened smartphones. We have demonstrated the feasibility of SmartSiren through implementaions on a Dopod 577w smartphone, and evaluated its effectiveness using simulations driven by 3-week SMS traces from a national cellular carrier. Our results show that SmartSiren can effectively prevent wide-area virus outbreaks with affordable overhead.