Muse: Towards robust and stealthy mobile botnets via multiple message push services

Abstract

Exploiting unique features in mobile networks and smartphones, mobile botnets pose a severe threat to mobile users, because smartphones have become an indispensable part of our daily lives and carried a lot of private information. However, existing mobile botnets usually rely on a single command and control channel (e.g., a push server or an SMS server) to disseminate commands, which can become the bottleneck or a single point of failure, without considering the robustness. In this paper, we propose MUSE, a novel multiple push service-based botnet, which can significantly outperform existing push-styled mobile botnets in terms of robustness, controllability, scalability, and stealthiness. Although the basic idea of using multiple push services seems straightforward, we explore the design space of exploiting such services and tackle several challenging issues to overcome the limitations of existing push-styled mobile botnets. We have implemented MUSE by exploiting ten popular push services and evaluated it through extensive experiments. The results demonstrate not only MUSE’s feasibility but also its advantages, such as stealthiness, controllability etc.