The Taxonomy of Behavioural Parameters on Mobile Devices

M Adeel, L N Tokarchuk, M A Azam, S K A Khan

Mobile malware has emerged as one of the major threats for modern-day mobile networks. Since the first inception a decade ago, hundreds of types of mobile malware and their variants have been discovered. Interactions between mobile using technologies like Bluetooth, MMS, SMS, and mobile and home broadband, leave significant usage footprints on mobile devices. If acquired and processed, these footprints can be utilised for a variety of purposes including the detection of mobile malware. This work is aimed at introducing various behaviour parameters against which the footprints can be recorded, and the processing of these parameters to produce high-order parameters that can prove very effective in different types of device and network-specific analysis including detection of malware. It is important to state that this work is limited to presenting a comprehensive taxonomy of behaviour parameters only, and a discussion on the mechanism of utilising the behaviour parameters in analysis such as detection of malware is beyond the scope of this work.

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