Location-Aware Mobile Intrusion Detection with Enhanced Privacy in a 5G Context

Abstract

The paper proposes a location-aware mobile Intrusion Prevention System (mIPS) architecture with enhanced privacy that is integrated in Managed Security Service (MSS). The solution is envisaged in a future fifth generation telecommunications (5G) context with increased but varying bandwidth, a virtualised execution environment and infrastructure that allows threads, processes, virtual machines and storage to be migrated to cloud computing services on demand, to dynamically scale performance and save power. 5G mobile devices will be attractive targets for malicious software, and this threat will in some cases change with location. Mobile devices will store more sensitive information and will also be used to a larger extent for sensitive transactions than they typically do today. In addition, a distributed execution environment in itself gives raise to some new security challenges. In order to handle these security challenges, we have proposed the location-aware mIPS architecture, which benefits from a distributed execution environment where processor intensive services can be outsourced to Cloud hosting providers. The mIPS supports querying location threat profiles in a privacy-preserving way, and ensures that mIPS alerts sent to the the first-line MSS are anonymised. We finally perform an analysis of potential strengths and weaknesses of the proposed approach.