RealCatch: A community-based real-time platform for financial fraud protection on smartphones

Abstract

In light of the rapid growth of smartphones, there are unrelenting malicious attacks on smartphones from voice phishing to mobile malwares. However, our protection against the various types of malicious attacks is much slower than the rapid evolution of the attacks since the analysis of the malicious attacks on smartphones usually takes much more time and efforts than hackers evolve their attack methods. To address the issue, we propose a community-based real-time platform that gathers malicious attack information, which is selected from anonymized communication records transferred from users' smartphones. We then share the information with users in realtime. Our platform also features that it supports the real-time analysis of Android applications which are driven to be installed by URLs in SMS messages. It also presents a unique feature that the downloaded apps can be compared with known malwares at runtime. It is realized by our hash-valued n-g ra m search index built on top of conventional databases by exploiting facilities already available in the off-the-shelf database systems.