Towards cloud-based compositions of security functions for mobile devices

In order to prevent attacks against smartphones and tablets, dedicated security applications are usually deployed on the mobile devices themselves. However, these applications may have a significant impact on the device resources, and users may be tempted to uninstall or disable them. In this paper, we propose a new approach to outsource mobile security functions and build transparent in-path security compositions for mobile devices. The functions are dynamically activated, configured and composed using software-defined networking and virtualization capabilities. We present a mathematical formalization to model the security compositions, and describe the functional architecture. We provide an implementation prototype and evaluate the solution through an extensive set of experiments.