Energy-efficient Run-time Detection of Malware-infected Executables and Dynamic Libraries on Mobile Devices

Since malwares in mobile devices are expected to follow the same evolution of malwares in PC environment, it seems useful to apply malware defense techniques in PC environment to mobile devices. However, the malware defense techniques have limitations in terms of energy efficiency and maintenance, so that it will be inefficient to use the techniques on mobile devices, especially if the number of mobile malwares increases explosively. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient run-time detection scheme which detects malware-infected executables and dynamic libraries on mobile devices. The proposed scheme works under collaboration between mobile devices and a binary- inspection server. To reduce energy consumption for security operation and achieve lightweight and easy maintenance, malware detection is delegated to the server. In experiments with a mobile device under embedded Linux, we show that our scheme guarantees the use of less energy of mobile devices and keeps security of all the mobile devices up-to-date easily and provides the mobile devices with strong protection that puts the advantages of the malware defense techniques in PC environment together.