Security Steps for Smartphone Users

Pieterse and Olivier

2013

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Abstract

Smart phones are an important asset for people living in the 21st century.With functionality similar to computers, smart phones have become all-in-one portable devices providing interconnectivity and device-to-device communication. Such continuous improvement in capabilities will cause the popularity of smart phones to constantly rise. Besides the popularity of smart phones there has also been a sharp increase in mobile malware. Most of the mobile malware recently discovered target Google’s Android operating system. The ease of modifying and the simplicity of the design of the operating system are the aspects that are drawing malware developers towards Android smart phones. This study focus on the current state of mobile malware, the adequacy of mobile security applications and possible security steps smart phone users can take to prevent mobile malware attacks. To evaluate the adequacy of current mobile security applications a malicious Android application is developed and deployed on an Android smartphone. In addition, this new Android application is also evaluated against mobile security applications. From the results additional security steps are identified that users of smartphones can follow to prevent or detect possible mobile malware infections. The ultimate goal of this research is to eventually automate the identified steps in the form of an application rather than depending on the user to execute the steps.

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