2010/12/14 by Pu Wang, Wang, Pu, Marta C. González +5
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) #Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph) #cs.CR #cs.NI #physics.soc-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1012.3156
19 pages, 6 figures
arxiv created 2010/12/14 · arxiv updated 2010/12/15
The fast growing market for smart phones coupled with their almost continuous online presence makes these devices the new targets of virus writers. It has been recently found that the topological spread of MMS (Multimedia Message Services) viruses is highly restricted by the underlying fragmentation of the call graph. In this paper, we study MMS viruses under another type of spreading behavior: scanning. We find that hybrid MMS viruses including some level of scanning are more dangerous to the mobile community than their standard topological counterparts. However, the effectiveness of both scanning and topological behaviors in MMS viruses can generally be limited by two controlling methods: (i) decreasing susceptible handsets' market share (OS it runs) and (ii) improving monitoring capacity to limit the frequency in which MMS messages can be sent by the mobile viruses.