Abstract

Smartphones are ubiquitous devices that represent the next generation of mobile phones. They combine mobility with high computational power and provide standardized operating systems allowing 3rd party software development. The problem about this is that besides normal software so called malicious software (malware) can be developed using the same development tools and application programming interfaces (APIs). Such malware targeting smarpthones can cause serious damages and costs where the first smartphone malware appeared in June 2004. Since then, the number of new emerging malware raised steadily. In order to show that smarphone malware is highly underestimated we describe smartphones characteristics and how malware can exploit them. We present a list of the most common behavior patterns and investigate possibilities how to exploit the given standard Symbian OS API for additional malware functionalities. This can be done easily and the corresponding sample malwares that we developed are described.

@techreport{schmidt:2008:trmsfsp,
author = {Aubrey-Derrick Schmidt and Sahin Albayrak},
title = {Malicious Software for Smartphones},
institution = {Technische Universit{"a}t Berlin - DAI-Labor},
year = {2008},
number = {TUB-DAI 02/08-01},
month = {~#feb#},
note = {url{http://www.dai-labor.de}}
}