Evaluation of Smartphone Security Challenges and Measures

Abstract

The term Smartphone refers to a mobile phone integrated with an operating system like Android, iOS, Windows. In today's technological world, Smartphone's have become ubiquitous[. The main reason of such high usage of these phones is that their ability to perform multiple functions when compared to the traditional mobile phones. In addition to the features provided by the traditional mobile phones, these phones support a wide variety of operations such as access to the internet through Wi-Fi/3G/4G connectivity, most of such devices have an in-built browser to perform this operation[1][2]. Apart from this feature, it also provides Bluetooth connectivity, access to digital media, for mobile payment transactions integrated with NFC technology, gives location accuracy, enable the feature of downloading third party applications. Most of functions which are performed by the personal computers can also be done using these. We are in a position where there is more utilization of Smartphone's when compared to the traditional PC's in today's market. These devices also carry highly confidential data such as bank details, social media accounts, email details and more. One could also observe that with the increase in the utilization of these devices, there is more and more storage of personal information on it. With this increase in the popularity of the devices, there are also many vulnerable attacks and many other security issues with them. Types of attacks can be mobile malware, phishing scams, and network spoofing attacks, surveillance attacks, and network congestion. In this interim report, we focus and provide our analysis or survey on various such kinds of attacks, give few in depth details and report accordingly.