Smartphone Security: Classifying, Organizing and Correlating Smartphone Defenses from Existing Knowledge Base

Abstract

As the popularity of smartphone applications has increased, they have also become under greater threat due to increasing mobile malware attacks. Smartphone malware across all platforms have faced phenomenal growth in past year. This figure may grow at exponential rate in future as open source platforms are continuing to capture the smartphone market share. Smartphone malware are growing to be very sophisticated in nature targeting anything from communications, location, personal or identifiable information. Even more alarming is the fact that a high percentage of defense and mobile anti-virus applications are ineffective in detecting these malware. A number of detection and defense mechanisms have emerged in the last decade to tackle the smartphone malware phenomenon. It is important to organize this huge ingress of knowledge to better understand the smartphone malware solution space. A taxonomy is proposed that encompasses latest state of the art research contributions in the domain of smartphone security including defenses and security mechanisms proposed by smartphone research community. These contributions comprise dedicated defenses (kernel, middle-ware extensions and applications’ analysis etc.), security evaluation of smartphone platforms, survey on malware and suggested security mechanisms. It is important to mention that all of the discussed research contributions serve their purpose, one way or other to contribute towards smartphone security and strengthening the trust factor of smartphone users. All of the contributions so far have provided profound exploration of the field of smartphone security from multiple aspects. Research community has analyzed and proposed security solutions for a large number of malware families and threats that may harm the user one way or another. Each of the solution adopts one or more unique approach to solve the growing threats for smartphone users. It has been observed that it is getting very necessary to summarize and categorize this huge influx of existing knowledge into a taxonomy where it can be systemized, organized, classified and categorized in the form of comprehensive taxonomy of detection and defenses.