Mobile information warfare: A countermeasure to privacy leaks based on SecureMyDroid

Abstract

Mobile device privacy is becoming increasingly important, as business information and personal information moves from personal computer to laptop and handheld devices. These data, enhanced with the raising computational and storage power of current mobile devices, lead to prefigure an enlarged scenario, where people will use massively smartphones for daily activities, regardless they are personal affairs or work. Hence, mobile devices represent an attractive target for attacks to the privacy of their owners. In particular, SpyPhone applications represent a big concern for confidential activities, acting as a bug and menacing both voice calls and data exchanged/stored mainly in form of text and multimedia messages and electronic mails. This paper proposes a new methodological approach to protect mobile devices from threats related to the privacy of mobile device owner. In particular, we suggest the cooperation of SecureMyDroid, a customized release of the Android OS, and the open source forensic tool Mobile Internal Acquisition Tool, to prevent privacy leaks related to SpyPhone applications attacks. Experimental results show the suitability of the proposed strategy in order to support the detection of SpyPhone application installed on the mobile device. © Springer-Verlag 2011.