A leaky bucket called smartphone

This work is a survey presenting attacks on smartphones and recommending the best possible locations for deploying defensive mechanisms to mitigate those attacks. The attack vectors are categorized into three classes according to their characteristics as attacks via application layer, communication layer and operating system layer. We describe various attacks belonging to each of these classes and suggest locations where defensive mechanisms could be deployed to mitigate them. This paper does not intend to present a complete list of attacks. It rather tries to evaluate the best possible place for implementing the potential countermeasures to either prevent or to detect attacks with similar characteristics. The focus of this work is therefore to present a set of representative attacks on smartphone specific services and to identify meaningful locations where particular countermeasures available from the literature could be installed.