Smartphone reconnaissance: Operating system identification

Smartphone reconnaissance, the first step to launch security attacks to a target smartphone, enables an adversary to tailor attacks by exploiting known vulnerabilities of the target system. We investigate OS identification against smartphones that use encrypted traffic. A traffic content agnostic identification algorithm is proposed that is based on the spectral analysis of the encrypted traffic. The identification algorithm is designed for high identification accuracy by removing noise frequency components and for high efficiency in terms of computation complexity. We evaluate the identification algorithm against collected smartphone traffic. The experiment results show that the algorithm can identify the smartphone OS accurately. The identification accuracy can reach 100% with only 30 seconds of smartphone traffic.