Risk Assessment Model for Mobile Malware
George Stanescu · Journal of Mobile, Embedded and Distributed Systems (JMEDS) - Journal of Mobile, Embedded and Distributed Systems · 2015
The mobile technology is considered to be the fastest-developing IT security area. Only in the last year security threats around mobile devices have reached new heights in terms of both quality and quantity. The speed of this development has made possible several types of security attacks that, until recently, were only possible on computers. In terms of the most targeted mobile operating systems, Android continues to be the most vulnerable, although new ways of strengthening its security model were introduced by Google. The aim of this article is to provide a model for assessing the risk of mobile infection with malware, starting from a statistical analysis of the permissions required by each application installed into the mobile system. The software implementation of this model will use the Android operating system and in order to do so, we will start by analyzing its permission-based security architecture. Furthermore, based on statistical data regarding the most dangerous permissions, we build the risk assessment model and, to prove its efficiency, we scan some of the most popular apps and interpret the results. To this end, we offer an overview of the strengths and weaknesses of this permission-based model and we also state a short conclusion regarding model’s efficiency.