Physical media covert channels on smart mobile devices
Ed Novak, Yutao Tang, Zijiang Hao, Qun Li, Yifan Zhang · 2015
In recent years mobile smart devices such as tablets and smartphones have exploded in popularity. We are now in a world of ubiquitous smart devices that people rely on daily and carry everywhere. This is a fundamental shift for computing in two ways. Firstly, users increasingly place unprecedented amounts of sensitive information on these devices, which paints a precarious picture. Secondly, these devices commonly carry many physical world interfaces. In this paper, we propose information leakage malware, specifically designed for mobile devices, which uses covert channels over physical "real-world" media, such as sound or light. This malware is stealthy; able to circumvent current, and even state-of-the-art defenses to enable attacks including privilege escalation, and information leakage. We go on to present a defense mechanism, which balances security with usability to stop these attacks.