Topic: Fighting Mobile Malware — The Need for a Paradigm Shift
July 23, 2009
Dr Markus Jakobsson
As worrisome as the general malware problem is, the threat is even more acute in the context of mobile phones. It has been estimated that there will be a comparable number of smart phones and laptops/desktops computers in use in two to three years, at which time malware authors are certain to pay serious attention to this promising new platform. This will be the case not only because of the dominance of the platform, but also due to the richness of the data managed on phones, and the failure of the existing anti-virus (AV) paradigm on resource-constrained devices. (Currently, with close to a million new instances of Windows malware a day, there are close to 10,000 daily updates of AV filter rules; this volume is not possible for a smartphone to manage.) I will describe a new AV paradigm that allows for light-weight post-mortem detection of infection, and describe some security benefits arising from centralized analysis of event data.
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