A Survey on Security for Mobile Devices

TLDR

Mobile devices, enabled by ubiquitous connectivity such as GSM, GPRS, Bluetooth, and Wi‑Fi, have become essential in daily life but also attract increasing vulnerabilities and malware, prompting a surge in security research. This survey aims to deliver a structured, comprehensive overview of mobile device security research and to present an accessible taxonomy of the underlying models employed by existing solutions. The authors review 2004‑2011 literature on threats, vulnerabilities, and security solutions, categorizing approaches by detection principles, architecture, data sources, and operating systems, with a particular focus on IDS‑based models and tools.

Abstract

Nowadays, mobile devices are an important part of our everyday lives since they enable us to access a large variety of ubiquitous services. In recent years, the availability of these ubiquitous and mobile services has significantly increased due to the different form of connectivity provided by mobile devices, such as GSM, GPRS, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. In the same trend, the number and typologies of vulnerabilities exploiting these services and communication channels have increased as well. Therefore, smartphones may now represent an ideal target for malware writers. As the number of vulnerabilities and, hence, of attacks increase, there has been a corresponding rise of security solutions proposed by researchers. Due to the fact that this research field is immature and still unexplored in depth, with this paper we aim to provide a structured and comprehensive overview of the research on security solutions for mobile devices. This paper surveys the state of the art on threats, vulnerabilities and security solutions over the period 2004-2011, by focusing on high-level attacks, such those to user applications. We group existing approaches aimed at protecting mobile devices against these classes of attacks into different categories, based upon the detection principles, architectures, collected data and operating systems, especially focusing on IDS-based models and tools. With this categorization we aim to provide an easy and concise view of the underlying model adopted by each approach.