Smartphone strategic sampling in defending enterprise network security

Smartphones have made their inroads in enterprise environment, manifested in the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy: More employees are bringing their own smartphones to work and are using them to access enterprise information assets. The dilemma between responsiveness to security incidents and convenience/cost-effectiveness demands BYOD security solutions beyond the straightforward all-inclusive full-scanning or uniformly random sampling approaches. In this paper, we propose a carefully planned but otherwise random, or strategic, sampling approach out of this dilemma. Strategic sampling provides a balance between security responsiveness and cost effectiveness by identifying and periodically sampling those representative smartphones (security-wise). We validate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed strategic sampling via simulations driven by publicly available, real-world collected traces.