A stealthy evasive information invasion using covert channel in mobile phones

Abstract

The proliferation of mobile devices and widening technological advancements have led the world to potential repercussions of insecurities. This brings in the most intrinsic requirement of security in mobile devices that may have crucial information like contacts, messages or payment passwords. However, the rapid advancements and technological vulnerabilities have created a space for these threats to get in unnoticed from detection mechanisms like reverse engineering. Covert channels that either disrupt the information flow or thwart the flow in order to sidestep the detection mechanisms and leak sensitive information have been discovered in mobile devices also. The paper depicts an attack PCEII utilizing one of such covert channels and evasive mechanism to bypass the detection mechanisms like reverse engineering, data and control flow tracking a malware detection tools. The current research discusses the malicious approaches of such covert channels based evasive attacks, their operation, research gap and its solution in detail. Also, it open up an area for defense against covert channels to be incorporated in state-of-art tools.