DAGGER: Distributed architecture for granular mitigation of mobile based attacks

Abstract

In this paper, we present DAGGER, a distributed architecture for collaborating mobile hosts and telecom operators for the granular mitigation of mobile-based attacks. Due to the growing usage of network resources by mobile handsets and the increasing spread of malicious applications among those handsets, it has become vital for mobile operators to join the fight against mobile-based attacks in order to protect their resources and infrastructure. Several security solutions are available in the market for telecom operators to detect anomalies. DAGGER extends those solutions and enables the operators to not only detect the subscriber(s) that generated anomalies, but also to granularly identify the malicious applications behind those abnormalities, allowing the operators to terminate the malwares themselves rather than shutdown the network connection for the mobile subscriber(s). We present an Android host-based component and define the distributed host-network communication procedure in order to identify malicious applications causing network anomalies and thus to terminate such applications.