Due to the complex nature of mobile communication systems, most of the security efforts in its domain are isolated and scattered across underlying technologies. This has resulted in an obscure view of the overall security. In this work, we attempt to fix this problem by proposing a domain-specific threat modeling framework. By gleaning from a diverse and large body of security literature, we systematically organize the attacks on mobile communications into various tactics and techniques. Our framework is designed to model adversarial behavior in terms of its attack phases and to be used as a common taxonomy matrix. We also provide concrete examples of using the framework for modeling the attacks individually and comparing them with similar ones.
With the proliferation of wireless networks, mobile devices and medical devices are increasingly being equipped with wireless interfaces, such as Bluetooth and WiFi to allow easy access to and control of the medical devices. Unfortunately, the very presence and usage of such interfaces also expose the medical devices to novel attacks from malicious parties. The emerging threat from malicious mobile devices is significant and severe, since attackers can steal confidential data from a patient's medical device. Also, attackers can compromise the medical device and either feed doctors bad data fro…
The mobile device is one of the fasted growing technologies that is widely used in a diversifying sector. Mobile devices are used for everyday life, such as personal information exchange - chatting, email, shopping, and mobile banking, contributing to information security threats. Users' behavior can influence information security threats. More research is needed to understand users' threat avoidance behavior and motivation. Using Technology threat avoidance theory (TTAT), this study assessed factors that influenced mobile device users' threat avoidance motivations and behaviors as it relates …
For various reasons, the cloud computing paradigm is unable to meet certain requirements (e.g. low latency and jitter, context awareness, mobility support) that are crucial for several applications (e.g. vehicular networks, augmented reality). To fulfil these requirements, various paradigms, such as fog computing, mobile edge computing, and mobile cloud computing, have emerged in recent years. While these edge paradigms share several features, most of the existing research is compartmentalised; no synergies have been explored. This is especially true in the field of security, where most analys…
Modern technologies are becoming ever more integrated with each other. Mobile phones are becoming increasing intelligent, and handsets are growing ever more like computers in functionality. We are entering a new era - the age of smart houses, global advanced networks which encompass a wide range of devices, all of them exchanging data with each other. Such trends clearly open new horizons to malicious users, and the potential threats are self evident. In this paper, we study and discuss one of the most famous mobile operating systems 'Symbian'; its vulnerabilities and recommended protection te…
As technology and technology companies have grown in power, ubiquity, and societal influence, some companies -- and notably some mobile apps -- have come to be perceived as privacy threats. Prior work has considered how various factors impact perceptions of threat, including social factors, political speech, and user-interface design. In this work, we investigate how user-visible context clues impact perceptions about whether a mobile application application poses a privacy threat. We conduct a user study with 2109 users in which we find that users depend on context clues -- such as presence o…
Mobile agent technology offers a dramatically evolving computing paradigm in which a program, in the form of a software agent, can suspend its execution on a host computer, transfers itself to another agent-enabled host on the network, and resumes execution on the new host. It is 1960's since mobile code has been used in the form of remote job entry systems. Today's mobile agents can be characterized in a number of ways ranging from simple distributed objects to highly organized intelligent softwares. As a result of this rapid evolvement of mobile agents, plenty of critical security issues has…
Nowadays, mobile handsets combine the functionality of mobile phones and PDAs. Unfortunately, mobile handsets development process has been driven by market demand, focusing on new features and neglecting security. So, it is imperative to study the existing challenges that facing the mobile handsets threat containment process, and the different techniques and methodologies that used to face those challenges and contain the mobile handsets malwares. This paper also presents a new approach to group the different malware containment systems according to their typologies.
Phishing is an online identity theft, which aims to steal sensitive information such as username, password and online banking details from victims. To prevent this, phishing education needs to be considered. Game based education is becoming more and more popular. This paper introduces a mobile game prototype for the android platform based on a story, which simplifies and exaggerates real life. The elements of a game design framework for avoiding phishing attacks were used to address the game design issues and game design principles were used as a set of guidelines for structuring and presentin…
This paper presents a comprehensive investigation of authentication schemes for smart mobile devices. We start by providing an overview of existing survey articles published in the recent years that deal with security for mobile devices. Then, we describe and give a classification of threat models in smart mobile devices in five categories, including, identity-based attacks, eavesdropping-based attacks, combined eavesdropping and identity-based attacks, manipulation-based attacks, and service-based attacks. We also provide a classification of countermeasures into four types of categories, incl…
Exponential growth of the volume of Bluetooth-enabled devices indicates that it has become a popular way of wireless interconnections for exchanging information. The main goal of this paper is to analyze the most critical Bluetooth attacks in real scenarios. In order to find out the major vulnerabilities in modern Bluetooth-enabled mobile devices several attacks have performed successfully such as- Surveillance, Obfuscation, Sniffing, Unauthorized Direct Data Access (UDDA) and Man-in-the-Middle Attack (MITM). To perform the testbed, several devices are used such as mobile phones, laptops, note…
Mobile Internet is becoming the norm. With more personalized mobile devices in hand, many services choose to offer alternative, usually more convenient, approaches to authenticating and delivering the content between mobile users and service providers. One main option is to use SMS (i.e., short messaging service). Such carrier-grade text service has been widely used to assist versatile mobile services, including social networking, banking, to name a few. Though the text service can be spoofed via certain Internet text service providers which cooperated with carriers, such attacks haven well st…
Mobile edge caching is a promising technology for the next-generation mobile networks to effectively offer service environment and cloud-storage capabilities at the edge of networks. By exploiting the storage and computing resources at the network edge, mobile edge caching can significantly reduce service latency, decrease network load, and improve user experience. On the other hand, edge caching is subject to a number of threats regarding privacy violation and security breach. In this article, we first introduce the architecture of mobile edge caching, and address the key problems regarding w…
Spam messages are an increasing threat to mobile communication. Several mitigation techniques have been proposed, including white and black listing, challenge-response and content-based filtering. However, none are perfect and it makes sense to use a combination rather than just one. We propose an anti-spam framework based on the hybrid of content-based filtering and challenge-response. There is the trade-offs between accuracy of anti-spam classifiers and the communication overhead. Experimental results show how, depending on the proportion of spam messages, different filtering %%@ parameters …
The growing popularity of smart mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets has made them an attractive target for cyber-criminals, resulting in a rapidly growing and evolving mobile threat as attackers experiment with new business models by targeting mobile users. With the emergence of the first large-scale mobile botnets, the core network has also become vulnerable to distributed denial-of-service attacks such as the signaling attack. Furthermore, complementary access methods such as Wi-Fi and femtocells introduce additional vulnerabilities for the mobile users as well as the core network…
Federated learning (FL) is a machine learning technique that aims at training an algorithm across decentralized entities holding their local data private. Wireless mobile networks allow users to communicate with other fixed or mobile users. The road traffic network represents an infrastructure-based configuration of a wireless mobile network where the Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAV) represent the communicating entities. Applying FL in a wireless mobile network setting gives rise to a new threat in the mobile environment that is very different from the traditional fixed networks. The thr…
Researchers and commercial companies have made a lot of efforts on detecting malware in Android platform. However, a recent malware threat, App collusion, makes malware detection challenging. In App collusion, two or more Apps collaborate to perform malicious actions by communicating with each other, which makes single App analysis insufficient. In this paper, we first introduce Android security mechanism and communication channels used by android Applications. Then we summarize the security vulnerabilities and potential threats introduced by App communication. Finally, we discuss state of art…
Ericsson Research（爱立信研究院）；Ericsson Security Research（爱立信安全研究院）；KTH Royal Institute of Technology（瑞典皇家理工学院）
Machine Learning (ML) is an important enabler for optimizing, securing and managing mobile networks. This leads to increased collection and processing of data from network functions, which in turn may increase threats to sensitive end-user information. Consequently, mechanisms to reduce threats to end-user privacy are needed to take full advantage of ML. We seamlessly integrate Federated Learning (FL) into the 3GPP 5G Network Data Analytics (NWDA) architecture, and add a Multi-Party Computation (MPC) protocol for protecting the confidentiality of local updates. We evaluate the protocol and fin…
Abuse of zero-permission sensors on-board mobile and wearable devices to infer users' personal context and information is a well-known privacy threat that has received significant attention. Efforts towards protection mechanisms that prevent or limit the success of such threats, however, have been ad-hoc so far and have primarily focused on designing threat-specific customized defense mechanisms. Such approaches are not very practical, as evident from their limited adoption within major mobile/wearable operating systems. In the end, it is clear that all privacy threats that take advantage of u…
This paper presents a secure communication application called DiscoverFriends. Its purpose is to securely communicate to a group of online friends while bypassing their respective social networking servers under a mobile ad hoc network environment. DiscoverFriends leverages Bloom filters and a hybrid encryption technique with a self-organized public-key management scheme to securely identify friends and provide authentication. Additionally, DiscoverFriends enables anonymous location check-ins by utilizing a new cryptographic primitive called Function Secret Sharing. Finally, to the best of our…
The burgeoning technology of Mobile Edge Computing is attracting the traditional LBS and LS to deploy due to its nature characters such as low latency and location awareness. Although this transplant will avoid the location privacy threat from the central cloud provider, there still exists the privacy concerns in the LS of MEC scenario. Location privacy threat arises during the procedure of the fingerprint localization, and the previous studies on location privacy are ineffective because of the different threat model and information semantic. To address the location privacy in MEC environment,…
Hangzhou Dianzi University（杭州电子科技大学）；University of Oslo（奥斯陆大学）
Mobile edge computing (MEC) is a promising approach for enabling cloud-computing capabilities at the edge of cellular networks. Nonetheless, security is becoming an increasingly important issue in MEC-based applications. In this paper, we propose a deep-learning-based model to detect security threats. The model uses unsupervised learning to automate the detection process, and uses location information as an important feature to improve the performance of detection. Our proposed model can be used to detect malicious applications at the edge of a cellular network, which is a serious security thr…
One-sided network communication technologies such as RDMA and NVMe-over-Fabrics are quickly gaining adoption in production software and in datacenters. Although appealing for their low CPU utilization and good performance, they raise new security concerns that could seriously undermine datacenter software systems building on top of them. At the same time, they offer unique opportunities to help enhance security. Indeed, one-sided network communication is a double-edged sword in security. This paper presents our insights into security implications and opportunities of one-sided communication.
Satellite-based Communication systems are gaining renewed momentum in Industry and Academia, thanks to innovative services introduced by leading tech companies and the promising impact they can deliver towards the global connectivity objective tackled by early 6G initiatives. On the one hand, the emergence of new manufacturing processes and radio technologies promises to reduce service costs while guaranteeing outstanding communication latency, available bandwidth, flexibility, and coverage range. On the other hand, cybersecurity techniques and solutions applied in SATCOM links should be updat…
The emergence of mobile applications to execute sensitive operations has brought a myriad of security threats to both enterprises and users. In order to benefit from the large potential in smartphones there is a need to manage the risks arising from threats, while maintaining an easy interface for the users. In this paper we investigate the use of Trusted Platform Model (TPM) 2.0 to develop a secure application for smartphones using Windows Phone 8.1. In particular, we suggest a framework based on remote attestation as a proxy to authenticate remote services, where the device is associated to …
Wireless Sensor Network(WSN) is an emerging technology and explored field of researchers worldwide in the past few years, so does the need for effective security mechanisms. The sensing technology combined with processing power and wireless communication makes it lucrative for being exploited in abundance in future. The inclusion of wireless communication technology also incurs various types of security threats due to unattended installation of sensor nodes as sensor networks may interact with sensitive data and /or operate in hostile unattended environments. These security concerns be address…
Todays world is digital, global, and interconnected and mobile devices are at the heart of modern communications in business, politics, and civil society. However, cyber threats are an omnipresent reality in our hyper-connected world. The world economic forum ranks cyber threats consistently among the global top security risks. Attacks on mobile devices grow yearly in volume and magnitude causing severe damage. This paper offers a comprehensive overview of modern mobile attacks categorized into malware, phishing, communication, supply chain, physical, and authentication attacks, including a se…
Mobile and Internet of Things devices are generating enormous amounts of multi-modal data due to their exponential growth and accessibility. As a result, these data sources must be directly analyzed in real time at the network edge rather than relying on the cloud. Significant processing power at the network's edge has made it possible to gather data and make decisions prior to data being sent to the cloud. Moreover, security problems have significantly towered as a result of the rapid expansion of mobile devices, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and various network points. It's much harder t…
With increasing complexity of modern-day mobile devices, security of these devices in presence of myriad attacks by an intelligent adversary is becoming a major issue. The vast majority of cell phones still remain unsecured from many existing and emerging security threats. To address the security threats in mobile devices we are exploring a technology, which we refer as "Collaborative Trust". It is a technology that uses a system of devices cooperating with each other (working in a fixed or ad-hoc network) to achieve the individual security of each device. The idea is that each device is insec…
The age of technology has created a huge market for smartphones and Apps usage and a new generation has been created based on knowledge sharing. Now knowledge has been made easily accessible by Apps but; are users even aware of the permissions that these Apps require and the privacy issues involved? The study was conducted on the basis of how users make use of Apps. It was conducted through the assessment of permissions required by various Apps through carefully selected third-party Apps and the devices settings and also a review of existing literature that has been conducted in fields within …
Mobile devices and technologies offer a tremendous amount of benefits to users, although it is also understood that it introduces a set of challenges when it comes to security, compliance, and risks. More and more healthcare organizations have been seeking to update their outdated technology, and have considered the adoption of mobile devices to meet these needs. However, introducing mobile devices and technology also introduces new risks and threats to the organization. As a test case, we examine Epic Rover, a mobile application that has been identified as a viable solution to manage the elec…
Traffic management, road safety, and environmental impact are important issues in the modern world. These challenges are addressed by the application of sensing, control and communication methods of intelligent transportation systems (ITS). A part of ITS is a vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) which means a wireless network of vehicles. However, communication among vehicles in a VANET exposes several security threats which need to be studied and addressed. In this review, firstly, the basic flow of VANET is illustrated focusing on its communication methods, architecture, characteristics, standar…
Phishing is an online identity theft that aims to steal sensitive information such as username, passwords and online banking details from its victims. Phishing education needs to be considered as a means to combat this threat. This book focuses on a design and development of a mobile game prototype as an educational tool helping computer users to protect themselves against phishing attacks. The elements of a game design framework for avoiding phishing attacks were used to address the game design issues. The mobile game design aimed to enhance the user's avoidance behaviour through motivation t…
A mobile agent is a software code with mobility which can be move from a computer into another computers through network. The mobile agent paradigm provides many benefits in developments of distributed application at the same time introduce new requirements for security issues with these systems. In this article we present a solution for protection agent from other agents attacks with loging patterns of malicious agent and useing this log for communication. We implemented our resolution by JADE.
As device interconnectivity and ubiquitous computing continues to proliferate healthcare, the Medical Internet of Things (MIoT), also well known as the, Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) or the Internet of Healthcare Things (IoHT), is certain to play a major role in the health, and well-being of billions of people across the globe. When it comes to issues of cybersecurity risks and threats connected to the IoT in all of its various flavors the emphasis has been on technical challenges and technical solution. However, especially in the area of healthcare there is another substantial and potenti…
Intrusion detection systems have become a key component in ensuring the safety of systems and networks. As networks grow in size and speed continues to increase, it is crucial that efficient scalable techniques should be developed for IDS systems. Signature based detection is the most extensively used threat detection technique for Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS). One of the foremost challenges for signaturebased IDS systems is how to keep up with large volume of incoming traffic when each packet needs to be compared with every signature in the database. When an IDS cannot keep up with the t…
With the rapid spread of various mobile terminals in our society, the importance of secure positioning is growing for wireless networks in adversarial settings. Recently, several authors have proposed a secure positioning mechanism of mobile terminals which is based on the geometric property of wireless node placement, and on the postulate of modern physics that a propagation speed of information never exceeds the velocity of light. In particular, they utilize the measurements of the round-trip time of radio signal propagation and bidirectional communication for variants of the challenge-and-r…
This research aims to design an educational mobile game for home computer users to prevent from phishing attacks. Phishing is an online identity theft which aims to steal sensitive information such as username, password and online banking details from victims. To prevent this, phishing education needs to be considered. Mobile games could facilitate to embed learning in a natural environment. The paper introduces a mobile game design based on a story which is simplifying and exaggerating real life. We use a theoretical model derived from Technology Threat Avoidance Theory (TTAT) to address the …
In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a Systematic Inter-Component Communication Analysis Technology (SIAT) consisting of two key modules: \emph{Monitor} and \emph{Analyzer}. As an extension to the Android operating system at framework layer, the \emph{Monitor} makes the first attempt to revise the taint tag approach named TaintDroid both at method-level and file-level, to migrate it to the app-pair ICC paths identification through systemwide tracing and analysis of taint in intent both at the data flow and control flow. By taking over the taint logs offered by the \emph{M…
By using smart radio devices, a jammer can dynamically change its jamming policy based on opposing security mechanisms; it can even induce the mobile device to enter a specific communication mode and then launch the jamming policy accordingly. On the other hand, mobile devices can exploit spread spectrum and user mobility to address both jamming and interference. In this paper, a two-dimensional anti-jamming mobile communication scheme is proposed in which a mobile device leaves a heavily jammed/interfered-with frequency or area. It is shown that, by applying reinforcement learning techniques,…
Device-to-Device (D2D) communication is mainly launched by the transmission requirements between devices for specific applications such as Proximity Services in Long-Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-A) networks, and each application will form a group of devices for the network-covered and network-absent D2D communications. Although there are many privacy concerns in D2D communication, they have not been well-addressed in current communication standards. This work introduces network-covered and network-absent authenticated key exchange protocols for D2D communications to guarantee accountable group…
Phishing is an online fraudulent technique, which aims to steal sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and online banking details from its victims. To prevent this, anti-phishing education needs to be considered. This research focuses on examining the effectiveness of mobile game based learning compared to traditional online learning to thwart phishing threats. Therefore, a mobile game prototype was developed based on the design introduced by Arachchilage and Cole [3]. The game design aimed to enhance avoidance behaviour through motivation to thwart phishing threats. A website deve…
Fully autonomous vehicles are emerging vehicular technologies that have gained significant attention in todays research endeavours. Even though it promises to optimize road safety, the proliferation of wireless and sensor technologies makes it susceptible to cyber threats thus dawdling its adoption. The identification of threats and design of apposite security solutions is therefore pertinent to expedite its adoption. In this paper, we analyse the security risks of the communication infrastructure for the fully autonomous vehicle using a subset of the TVRA methodology by ETSI. We described the…
This work includes a review of two cases study of mobile applications that use Identity-Based Cryptography (IBC) to protect communications. It also describes a proposal of a new mobile application that combines the use of IBC for Wi-Fi or Bluetooth communication between smartphones, with the promising Near Field Communication (NFC) technology for secure authentication. The proposed scheme involves NFC pairing to establish as public key a piece of information linked to the device, such as the phone number, so that this information is then used in an IBC scheme for peer-to-peer communication. Th…
Mobile GUI Agents under Real-world Threats: Are We There Yet?
Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR), Tsinghua University（人工智能产业研究院（AIR），清华大学）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科学与技术大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；MiLM Plus, Xiaomi Inc.（MiLM Plus，小米公司）
The 5G mobile communication network provides seamless communications between users and service providers and promises to achieve several stringent requirements, such as seamless mobility and massive connectivity. Although 5G can offer numerous benefits, security and privacy issues still need to be addressed. For example, the inclusion of small cell networks (SCN) into 5G brings the network closer to the connected users, providing a better quality of services (QoS), resulting in a significant increase in the number of Handover procedures (HO), which will affect the security, latency and efficie…
Wireless sensor networks consist of sensor nodes with limited computational and communication capabilities. This paper deals with mobile sensors which are divided into clusters based on their physical locations. Efficient ways of key distribution among the sensors and inter and intra cluster communications are examined. The security of the entire network is considered through efficient key management by taking into consideration the network's power capabilities.
The impact of localization systems in our daily lives is increasing. As next-generation networks will introduce hyperconnectivity with the emerging applications, this impact will undoubtedly further increase, proliferating the importance of the location information's reliability. As society becomes more dependent on this information in terms of the products and services, security solutions will have to be enriched to provide countermeasures sufficiently advanced to ever-evolving threats, forcing the joint design of communication and localization systems. This paper envisions integrated communi…
For the sake of protecting data privacy and due to the rapid development of mobile devices, e.g., powerful central processing unit (CPU) and nascent neural processing unit (NPU), collaborative machine learning on mobile devices, e.g., federated learning, has been envisioned as a new AI approach with broad application prospects. However, the learning process of the existing federated learning platforms rely on the direct communication between the model owner, e.g., central cloud or edge server, and the mobile devices for transferring the model update. Such a direct communication may be energy i…
Conventional wireless security assumes wireless communications are rightful and aims to protect them against malicious eavesdropping and jamming attacks. However, emerging infrastructure-free mobile communication networks are likely to be illegally used (e.g., by criminals or terrorists) but difficult to be monitored, thus imposing new challenges on the public security. To tackle this issue, this article presents a paradigm shift of wireless security to the surveillance and intervention of infrastructure-free suspicious and malicious wireless communications, by exploiting legitimate eavesdropp…
GhostEI-Bench: Do Mobile Agents Resilience to Environmental Injection in Dynamic On-Device Environments?
Shanghai Jiao Tong University, School of Computer Science（上海交通大学计算机科学学院）；Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）
