A Survey on Smartphones Security: Software Vulnerabilities, Malware, and Attacks

Abstract

Nowadays, the usage of smartphones and their applications have become rapidly popular in people's daily life. Over the last decade, availability of mobile money services such as mobile-payment systems and app markets have significantly increased due to the different forms of apps and connectivity provided by mobile devices, such as 3G, 4G, GPRS, and Wi-Fi, etc. In the same trend, the number of vulnerabilities targeting these services and communication networks has raised as well. Therefore, smartphones have become ideal target devices for malicious programmers. With increasing the number of vulnerabilities and attacks, there has been a corresponding ascent of the security countermeasures presented by the researchers. Due to these reasons, security of the payment systems is one of the most important issues in mobile payment systems. In this survey, we aim to provide a comprehensive and structured overview of the research on security solutions for smartphone devices. This survey reviews the state of the art on security solutions, threats, and vulnerabilities during the period of 2011-2017, by focusing on software attacks, such those to smartphone applications. We outline some countermeasures aimed at protecting smartphones against these groups of attacks, based on the detection rules, data collections and operating systems, especially focusing on open source applications. With this categorization, we want to provide an easy understanding for users and researchers to improve their knowledge about the security and privacy of smartphones.