This paper reviews existing Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) that target the Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC), Cloud Computing (CC), and Mobile Device (MD) environment. The review identifies the drawbacks in existing solutions and proposes a novel approach towards enhancing the security of the User Layer (UL) in the MCC environment. The approach named MINDPRES (Mobile- Cloud Intrusion Detection and Prevention System) combines a host-based IDS and network-based IDS using Machine Learning (ML) techniques. It applies dynamic analysis of both device resources and network traffic in order to detect malicious activities at the UL in the MCC environment. Preliminary investigations show that our approach will enhance the security of the UL in the MCC environment. Our future work will include the development and the evaluation of the proposed model across the various mobile platforms in the MCC environment.
We have designed a tiered security system for mobile devices where each security tier holds user-defined security triggers and actions. It has a friendly interface that allows users to easily define and configure the different circumstances and actions they need according to context. The system can be set up and activated from any browser or directly on the mobile device itself. When the security system is operated from a Web site or server, its configuration can be readily shared across multiple devices. When operated directly from the mobile device, no server is needed for activation. Many d…
This is the Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Mobile Security Technologies (MoST) 2014, held in San Jose, CA, USA, on May 17, 2014. The workshop was held as part of the IEEE Computer Society Security and Privacy Workshops, in conjunction with the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.
Mobile devices are more than just phones, they are a lifeline to the outdoor world, entertainment platform, GPS system, a little black book and a shopping and banking tool. What is not well known is that these devices are also gateways. Mobile devices can be used by a hacker as an access point into many other aspects of your digital life as well the lives of others in your network, making mobile security about more than just protecting your phone. This is an overview of technologies supporting mobile data cryptography and two-step protection mechanisms that may be used to secure online transac…
Mobile edge computing usually uses cache to support multimedia contents in 5G mobile Internet to reduce the computing overhead and latency. Mobile edge caching (MEC) systems are vulnerable to various attacks such as denial of service attacks and rogue edge attacks. This article investigates the attack models in MEC systems, focusing on both the mobile offloading and the caching procedures. In this paper, we propose security solutions that apply reinforcement learning (RL) techniques to provide secure offloading to the edge nodes against jamming attacks. We also present light-weight authenticat…
[Background] Web communication is universal in cyberspace, and security risks in this domain are devastating. [Aims] We analyzed the prevalence of six security smells in mobile app servers, and we investigated the consequence of these smells from a security perspective. [Method] We used an existing dataset that includes 9714 distinct URLs used in 3376 Android mobile apps. We exercised these URLs twice within 14 months and investigated the HTTP headers and bodies. [Results] We found that more than 69% of tested apps suffer from three kinds of security smells, and that unprotected communication …
Enterprise Mobility has been increasing the reach over the years. Initially Mobile devices were adopted as consumer devices. However, the enterprises world over have rightly taken the leap and started using the ubiquitous technology for managing its employees as well as to reach out to the customers. While the Mobile ecosystem has been evolving over the years, the increased exposure of mobility in Enterprise framework have caused major focus on the security aspects of it. While a significant focus have been put on network security, this paper discusses on the approach that can be taken at Mobi…
Phishing in mobile applications is a relevant threat with successful attacks reported in the wild. In such attacks, malicious mobile applications masquerade as legitimate ones to steal user credentials. In this paper we categorize application phishing attacks in mobile platforms and possible countermeasures. We show that personalized security indicators can help users to detect phishing attacks and have very little deployment cost. Personalized security indicators, however, rely on the user alertness to detect phishing attacks. Previous work in the context of website phishing has shown that us…
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…
Mobile devices are becoming part of modern digital avionics. Mobile devices can be applied to a range of scenarios, from Electronic Flight Bags to maintenance platforms, in order to manage and configure flight information, configure avionics networks or perform maintenance tasks (including offloading flight logs). It can be argued that recent developments show an increased use of personal mobile devices playing an integral part in the digital avionics industry. In this paper, we look into different proposals for integrating mobile devices with various avionics networks -- either as part of the…
The aim of the paper is to provide a solution which increases the security of a mobile environment for both individuals and for workers in an enterprise. The proposed solution adapts Shamir's approach for sharing a secret for encryption key management. One part of the key is stored on a Bluetooth (or NFC) wristband or on an enterprise server, while a mobile device is used to store all the rest. The approach can be applied for both securing documents and voice data. The solution is supported by a mathematical formality which is missing in the currently known advice within cryptographic folklore…
The recent developments in the mobile technology (mobile phones, middleware) created a need for new methods of protecting the code transmitted through the network. The proposed mechanisms not only secure the compiled program, but also the data, that can be gathered during its "journey". The oldest and the simplest methods are more concentrated on integrity of the code itself and on the detection of unauthorized manipulation. Other, more advanced proposals protect not only the code but also the execution state and the collected data. The paper is divided into two parts. The first one is mostly …
Looking at the last decade, progress in technology has made a huge impact on our lifestyles. Enhanced use of mobile phones has provided a technological breakthrough, with the latest smartphones capturing the market. The word smartphone is enough for everyone to understand the tremendous potential it brought to the market in terms of economics as well as usability. Not only this, this ever growing mobile mania has a lot more to offer. The familiarity of applications like dropbox etc is a clear indication of the popularity of mobile and cloud computing. But where we get all the benefits from thi…
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…
As we are moving towards the Internet of Things (IoT) era, the number of connected physical devices is increasing at a rapid pace. Mobile edge computing is emerging to handle the sheer volume of produced data and reach the latency demand of computation-intensive IoT applications. Although the advance of mobile edge computing on service latency is studied solidly, security and efficiency on data usage in mobile edge computing have not been clearly identified. In this article, we examine the architecture of mobile edge computing and explore the potentials of utilizing mobile edge computing to en…
The goal of this paper is to analyze the behavior and intent of recent types of privacy invasive Android adware. There are two recent trends in this area: more financial motives instead of ego motives, and the development of more dynamic analysis tools. This paper starts with a review of Android mobile operating system security, and also addresses the pros and cons of open source operating system security. Static analysis of malware provides high quality results and leads to a good understanding as shown in this paper. However, as malware grows in number and complexity, there have been recent …
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…
In this paper, we study the security posture of the EV charging ecosystem against a new type of remote that exploits vulnerabilities in the EV charging mobile applications as an attack surface. We leverage a combination of static and dynamic analysis techniques to analyze the security of widely used EV charging mobile applications. Our analysis was performed on 31 of the most widely used mobile applications including their interactions with various components such as cloud management systems. The attack, scenarios that exploit these vulnerabilities were verified on a real-time co-simulation te…
Previous Web access authentication systems often use either the Web or the Mobile channel individually to confirm the claimed identity of the remote user. This paper proposes a new protocol using multifactor authentication system that is both secure and highly usable. It uses a novel approach based on Transaction Identification Code and SMS to enforce extra security level with the traditional Login/password system. The system provides a highly secure environment that is simple to use and deploy, that does not require any change in infrastructure or protocol of wireless networks. This Protocol …
Mobile device authentication has been a highly active research topic for over 10 years, with a vast range of methods having been proposed and analyzed. In related areas such as secure channel protocols, remote authentication, or desktop user authentication, strong, systematic, and increasingly formal threat models have already been established and are used to qualitatively and quantitatively compare different methods. Unfortunately, the analysis of mobile device authentication is often based on weak adversary models, suggesting overly optimistic results on their respective security. In this ar…
Over the last decades, numerous security and privacy issues in all three active mobile network generations have been revealed that threaten users as well as network providers. In view of the newest generation (5G) currently under development, we now have the unique opportunity to identify research directions for the next generation based on existing security and privacy issues as well as already proposed defenses. This paper aims to unify security knowledge on mobile phone networks into a comprehensive overview and to derive pressing open research questions. To achieve this systematically, we …
Enhancing Software Supply Chain Resilience: Strategy For Mitigating Software Supply Chain Security Risks And Ensuring Security Continuity In Development Lifecycle
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 devices, such as phones, tablets and laptops, expose businesses and governments to a multitude of information security risks. While Information Systems research has focused on the security and privacy aspects from the end-user perspective regarding mobile devices, very little research has been conducted within corporate environments. In this work, thirty-two mobile devices were returned by employees in a global Fortune 500 company. In the empirical analysis, a number of significant security risks were uncovered which may have led to leakage of valuable intellectual property or exposed t…
Security of complex systems is an important issue in software engineering. For complex computer systems involving many actors, security protocols are often used for the communication of sensitive data. Actor key compromise (AKC) denotes a situation where the long-term secret key of an actor may be known to an adversary for some reasons. Many protocols are not secure enough for ensuring security in such a situation. In this paper, we further study this problem by looking at potential types of attacks, defining their formal properties and providing solutions to enhance the level of security. As …
Air University（空军大学）；Vellore Institute of Technology（韦洛尔理工学院）；Comenius University in Bratislava（布拉迪斯拉发夸美纽斯大学）
Cash payment is still king in several markets, accounting for more than 90\ of the payments in almost all the developing countries. The usage of mobile phones is pretty ordinary in this present era. Mobile phones have become an inseparable friend for many users, serving much more than just communication tools. Every subsequent person is heavily relying on them due to multifaceted usage and affordability. Every person wants to manage his/her daily transactions and related issues by using his/her mobile phone. With the rise and advancements of mobile-specific security, threats are evolving as we…
Security measures at banks can play a critical, contributory role in preventing attacks on customers. These measures are of paramount importance when considering vulnerabilities and causation in civil litigation. Banks must meet certain standards in order to ensure a safe and secure banking environment for their customers. This paper focuses on vulnerabilities and the increasing wave of criminal activities occurring at Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) where quick cash is the prime target for criminals rather than at banks themselves. A biometric measure as a means of enhancing the security has…
In this short paper we argue that to combat APTs, organizations need a strategic level shift away from a traditional prevention centered approach to that of a response centered one. Drawing on the information warfare (IW) paradigm in military studies, and using Dynamic Capability Theory (DCT), this research examines the applicability of IW capabilities in the corporate domain. We propose a research framework to argue that conventional prevention centred response capabilities; such as incident response capabilities and IW centred security capabilities can be integrated into IW enabled dynamic r…
Given that security threats and privacy breaches are com- monplace today, it is an important problem for one to know whether their device(s) are in a "good state of security", or is there a set of high- risk vulnerabilities that need to be addressed. In this paper, we address this simple yet challenging problem. Instead of gaining white-box access to the device, which offers privacy and other system issues, we rely on network logs and events collected offine as well as in realtime. Our approach is to apply analytics and machine learning for network security analysis as well as analysis of the …
Wireless sensor networks increasingly become viable solutions to many challenging problems and will successively be deployed in many areas in the future. However, deploying new technology without security in mind has often proved to be unreasonably dangerous. We propose a security architecture for self-organizing mobile wireless sensor networks that prevents many attacks these networks are exposed to. Furthermore, it limits the security impact of some attacks that cannot be prevented. We analyse our security architecure and show that it provides the desired security aspects while still being a…
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 th…
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…
As a popular application, mobile crowd sensing systems aim at providing more convenient service via the swarm intelligence. With the popularity of sensor-embedded smart phones and intelligent wearable devices, mobile crowd sensing is becoming an efficient way to obtain various types of sensing data from individuals, which will make people's life more convenient. However, mobile crowd sensing systems today are facing a critical challenge, namely the privacy leakage of the sensitive information and valuable data, which can raise grave concerns among the participants. To address this issue, we pr…
5G is enabling different services over the same physical infrastructure through the concepts and technologies of virtualization, softwarization, slicing and cloud computing. Virtual Mobile Networks (VMNs), using these concepts, provide an opportunity to share the same physical infrastructure among multiple operators. Each VMN Operator (VMNO) can have own distinct operating and support systems. However, the technologies used to enable VMNs have their own explicit security challenges and solutions. The integrated environment built upon virtualization, softwarization, and cloudification, thus, wi…
There is a rapid increase in the number of mobile banking applications' users due to an increase in smart mobile devices. Mobile banking is a financial transaction and service offered through mobile devices. Almost all financial institutions now provide mobile banking services to their customers. However, the security of mobile banking applications is of huge concern because of the amount of personal data and information they collect. If an attacker gets hold of personal information, they can access bank payment or card accounts. This research aims to analyze the vulnerability of the UK digita…
MANET is a kind of Ad hoc network with mobile, wireless nodes. Because of its special characteristics like dynamic topology, hop-by-hop communications and easy and quick setup, MANET faced lots of challenges allegorically routing, security and clustering. The security challenges arise due to MANETs self-configuration and self-maintenance capabilities. In this paper, we present an elaborate view of issues in MANET security. Based on MANETs special characteristics, we define three security parameters for MANET. In addition we divided MANET security into two different aspects and discussed each o…
In this paper, we develop a trust based security protocol based on a cross layer approach which attains confidentiality and authentication of packets in both routing and link layers of MANETs. In the first phase of the protocol, we design a trust based packet forwarding scheme for detecting and isolating the malicious nodes using the routing layer information. It uses trust values to favor packet forwarding by maintaining a trust counter for each node. A node is punished or rewarded by decreasing or increasing the trust counter. If the trust counter value falls below a trust threshold, the cor…
The widespread use of mobile electronic devices increases the complexities of mobile security. This paper aims to provide a secure communication environment for smartphone users. Some research proves that the one-time pad is one of the securest encryption methods, and the key distribution problem can be solved by using the QKD (quantum key distribution). The objective of this project is to design an Android APP (application) to exchange several random keys between mobile phones. Inspired by QKD, the developed APP uses the quick response (QR) code as a carrier to dispatch large amounts of one-t…
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…
Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETS) are transient networks of mobile nodes, connected through wireless links, without any fixed infrastructure or central management. Due to the self-configuring nature of these networks, the topology is highly dynamic. This makes the Ad Hoc Routing Protocols in MANETS highly vulnerable to serious security issues. In this paper, we survey the common security threats and attacks and summarize the solutions suggested in the survey to mitigate these security vulnerabilities.
In this work we present definitive evidence, analysis, and (where needed) speculation to answer the questions, (1) Which concrete security measures in mobile devices meaningfully prevent unauthorized access to user data? (2) In what ways are modern mobile devices accessed by unauthorized parties? (3) How can we improve modern mobile devices to prevent unauthorized access? We examine the two major platforms in the mobile space, iOS and Android, and for each we provide a thorough investigation of existing and historical security features, evidence-based discussion of known security bypass techni…
The Long Term Evolution (LTE) is the latest mobile standard being implemented globally to provide connectivity and access to advanced services for personal mobile devices. Moreover, LTE networks are considered to be one of the main pillars for the deployment of Machine to Machine (M2M) communication systems and the spread of the Internet of Things (IoT). As an enabler for advanced communications services with a subscription count in the billions, security is of capital importance in LTE. Although legacy GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) networks are known for being insecure and vul…
In this paper, we present a novel encryption-less algorithm to enhance security in transmission of data packets across mobile ad hoc networks. The paper hinges on the paradigm of multipath routing and exploits the properties of polynomials. The first step in the algorithm is to transform the data such that it is impossible to obtain any information without possessing the entire transformed data. The algorithm then uses an intuitively simple idea of a jigsaw puzzle to break the transformed data into multiple packets where these packets form the pieces of the puzzle. Then these packets are sent …
The increasing development speed via Agile may introduce overlooked security steps in the process, with an example being the Iowa Caucus application. Verifying the protection of confidential information such as social security numbers requires security at all levels, providing protection through any connected applications. CryptoGuard is a static code analyzer for Java. This program verifies that developers do not leave vulnerabilities in their applications. The program aids the developer by identifying cryptographic misuses such as hard-coded keys, weak program hashes, and using insecure prot…
