A Survey on Smartphones Security: Software Vulnerabilities, Malware, and Attacks

Abstract

Abstract-Nowadays, the usage of smartphones and their applications have become rapidly popular in people's daily life. Over the last decade, availability of mobile money services such as mobile-payment systems and app markets have significantly increased due to the different forms of apps and connectivity provided by mobile devices, such as 3G, 4G, GPRS, and Wi-Fi, etc. In the same trend, the number of vulnerabilities targeting these services and communication networks has raised as well. Therefore, smartphones have become ideal target devices for malicious programmers. With increasing the number of vulnerabilities and attacks, there has been a corresponding ascent of the security countermeasures presented by the researchers. Due to these reasons, security of the payment systems is one of the most important issues in mobile payment systems. In this survey, we aim to provide a comprehensive and structured overview of the research on security solutions for smartphone devices. This survey reviews the state of the art on security solutions, threats, and vulnerabilities during the period of 2011-2017, by focusing on software attacks, such those to smartphone applications. We outline some countermeasures aimed at protecting smartphones against these groups of attacks, based on the detection rules, data collections and operating systems, especially focusing on open source applications. With this categorization, we want to provide an easy understanding for users and researchers to improve their knowledge about the security and privacy of smartphones.

Technological Change in the Retirement Transition and the Implications for Cybersecurity Vulnerability in Older Adults

“…Choi (2008) suggests that one's online routines and the way in which these routines are managed, provide opportunities for victimisation in an online environment. We noted earlier that social media use is one of the biggest emerging threats for cybersecurity (Jang-Jaccard and Nepal, 2014), but boredom can also lead to increases in things like online play which brings a number of cybersecurity concerns, particularly when that play is associated with apps downloaded onto smartphones and tablets (Lu et al, 2012;Ahvanooey et al, 2017).…”

PesTrapp mobile app: A trap setting application for real-time entomological field and laboratory study

“…The mobile developers should minimize the mobile data access permissions to avoid malicious virus such as spyware, Rootkit and Trojan horses (Zhu et al, 2014). The users should keep mobile operating system up to date, encrypt mobile phone and use mobile security software (Ahvanooey et al, 2017). To protect the privacy of the residents thereat, images obtained of the ovitraps should be captured without their occupants.…”

ARANAC: A Bring-Your-Own-Permissions Network Access Control Methodology for Android Devices

“…As the social adoption of mobile platforms (namely smartphones, tablets and even IoT related devices) has become wider, the number of threats and security incidents for these kinds of devices has also increased [1], [12]- [14]. In this way, the topic of mobile security has consequently received significant attention by the research community in the last years [15]- [21], with a number of specific proposals being developed and specially focused on Android platforms.…”