CloudShield: Efficient anti-malware smartphone patching with a P2P network on the cloud

Abstract

The battery limits of today smartphones require a solution. In the scientific community it is believed that a promising way of prolonging battery life is to offload mobile computation to the cloud. State of the art offloading architectures consists of virtual copies of real smartphones (the clones) that run on the cloud, are synchronized with the corresponding devices, and help alleviate the computational burden on the real smartphones. Recently, it has been proposed to organize the clones in a peer-to-peer network in order to facilitate content sharing among the mobile smartphones. We believe that P2P network of clones, aside from content sharing, can be a useful tool to solve critical security problems on the mobile network of smartphones. In particular, we consider the problem of computing an efficient patching strategy to stop worm spreading between smartphones. The peer-to-peer network of clones is used to compute the best strategy to patch the smartphones in such a way that the number of devices to patch is low (to reduce the load on the cellular infrastructure) and that the worm is stopped quickly. We consider two well defined worms, one spreading between the devices and one attacking the cloud before moving to the real smartphones; we describe CloudShield, a suite of protocols running on the peer-to-peer network of clones; and we show by experiments that CloudShield outperforms state-of-theart worm-containment mechanisms for mobile wireless networks.