Emerging security threats for mobile platforms

The proliferation of smart-phone devices, with ever advancing technological features, has brought the issue of mobile device security back into focus. Mobile devices are rapidly becoming attractive targets for malicious attacks due to significant advances in both hardware and operating systems. The modern mobile platforms, like Android, iOS and Symbian, increasingly resemble traditional operating systems for PCs. Therefore, the challenges in enforcing smart-phone security are becoming similar to those present in PC platforms. By installing malicious content, smart-phones can be infected with worms, trojan horses or other virus families, which can compromise user's security and privacy or even gain complete control over the device. Such malicious content can easily spread due to advances in mobile network technologies which provide smart-phones with capability of constant Internet connection over 3G or Wi-Fi networks. Additionally, the improvements in smart-phone features introduce new types of security concerns. By compromising mobile OS, malicious applications can access voice-recording devices, cameras, intercept SMS messages or gain location information. Such security breaches severely compromise user's privacy. In this paper we present an analysis of contemporary mobile platform threats and give an in-depth overview of threat mitigation mechanisms built into state of the art mobile operating systems.