A Bio-Inspired Approach to Alarm Malware Attacks in Mobile Handsets

Taejin AHN  Taejoon PARK 

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems  Vol.E92-D  No.4  pp.742-745
Publication Date: 2009/04/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1361
Print ISSN: 0916-8532
Type of Manuscript: LETTER
Category: Dependable Computing
Keyword: 
bio-inspired approach,  biological immune system,  mobile immunity,  mobile handsets,  mobile malware, 

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Summary: 
With proliferation of smart handsets capable of mobile Internet, the severity of malware attacks targeting such handsets is rapidly increasing, thereby requiring effective countermeasure for them. However, existing signature-based solutions are not suitable for resource-poor handsets due to the excessive run-time overhead of matching against ever-increasing malware pattern database as well as the limitation of detecting well-known malware only. To overcome these drawbacks, we present a bio-inspired approach to discriminate malware (non-self) from normal programs (self) by replicating the processes of biological immune system. Our proposed approach achieves superior performance in terms of detecting 83.7% of new malware or their variants and scalable storage requirement that grows very slowly with inclusion of new malware, making it attractive for use with mobile handsets.