Cell Phone Virus and Security
Rapid advances in low-power computing, communications, and storage technologies continue to broaden the horizons of mobile devices, such as cell phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs). As the use of these devices extends into applications that srequire them to capture, store, access, or communicate sensitive data, (e.g., mobile ecommerce,financial transactions, acquisition and playback of copyrighted content, etc.) security becomes an immediate concern. Left unaddressed, security concerns threaten to impede the deployment of new applications and value-added services, which is an important engine of growth for the wireless, mobile appliance and semiconductor industries. According to a survey of mobile appliance users, 52% cited security concerns as the biggest impediment to their adoption of mobile commerce.
A cell-phone virus is basically the same thing as a computer virus — an unwanted executable file that “infects” a device and then copies itself to other devices. But whereas a computer virus or worm spreads through e-mail attachments and Internet downloads, a cell-phone virus or worm spreads via Internet downloads, MMS (multimedia messaging service) attachments and Bluetooth transfers. The most common type of cell-phone infection right now occurs when a cell phone downloads an infected file from a PC or the Internet, but phone-to-phone viruses are on the rise.
Current phone-to-phone viruses almost exclusively infect phones running the Symbian operating system. The large number of proprietary operating systems in the cell-phone world is one of the obstacles to mass infection. Cell-phone-virus writers have no Windows-level marketshare to target, so any virus will only affect a small percentage of phones.
Infected files usually show up disguised as applications like games, security patches, add-on functionalities and free stuff. Infected text messages sometimes steal the subject line from a message you’ve received from a friend, which of course increases the likelihood of your opening it — but opening the message isn’t enough to get infected. You have to choose to open the message attachment and agree to install the program, which is another obstacle to mass infection: To date, no reported phone-to-phone virus auto-installs. The installation obstacles and the methods of spreadinglimit the amount of damage the current generation of cell-phone virus can do.
Standard operating systems and Bluetooth technology will be a trend for future cell phone features. These will enable cellphone viruses to spread either through SMS or by sending Bluetooth requests when cellphones are physically close enough. The difference in spreading methods gives these two types of viruses’ different epidemiological characteristics. SMS viruses’ spread is mainly based on people’s social connections, whereas the spreading of Bluetooth viruses is affected by people’s mobility patterns and population distribution. Using cellphone data recording calls, SMS and locations of more than 6 million users, we study the spread of SMS and Bluetooth viruses and characterize how the social network and the mobility of mobile phone users affect such spreading processes.
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