A Security Monitoring Framework for Mobile Devices

Abstract

Quite often, organizations are confronted with the burden of managing mobile device assets, requiring control over installed applications, security, usage profiles or customization options. From this perspective, the emergence of the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend has aggravated the situation, making it difficult to achieve an adequate balance between corporate regulations, freedom of usage and device heterogeneity. Moreover, device and information protection on mobile ecosystems are quite different from securing other device assets such as laptops or desktops, due to their specific characteristics and limitations—quite often, the resource overhead associated with specific security mechanisms is more important for mobile devices than conventional computing platforms, as the former frequently have comparatively less computing capabilities and more strict power management policies. This paper presents an intrusion and anomaly detection framework specifically designed for managed mobile device ecosystems, that is able to integrate into mobile device and management frameworks for complementing conventional intrusion detection systems. In addition to presenting the reference architecture for the proposed framework, several implementation aspects are also analyzed, based on the lessons learned from developing a proof-of-concept prototype that was used for validation purposes.