2012 Symposium Posters

Project Members
Wei Peng, Feng Li, Xukai Zou (@ IUPUI), Jie Wu (@Temple University)

Smartphone-based mobile computing is emerging as a preferred computing platform of the future. Mobile botnet, which has deep roots in traditional Internet botnet and exploits unique characteristics of mobile computing in propagation, is an imminent security threat to the emerging computing platform. In the spirit of ``forewarned is forearmed'', we play devil's advocate by proposing techniques that mobile botnets might use to circumvent defense. The key ideas of our work are a novel concept of stealthy botnet and the distinct strategies used in two consecutive phases, herding and attack, in the lifetime of a stealthy botnet. A few points distinguish our research in the context of previous works. 1) Based on proximity malware propagation, we propose the concept of botnet-level stealthiness and a novel structural property, T-dominance, for a mobile botnet; the T-dominance property is defined upon mobility and social pattern of smartphone users. 2) We design a distributed algorithm which maintains the T-dominance structural property for a mobile botnet; the algorithm is localized and delay-tolerant in the sense that it maintains the structural property based solely on local and potentially outdated information.