Adaptive Security for Self-Protection of Mobile Computing Devices

Mobile computing has emerged as a pervasive technology that empowers its users with portable computation and context-aware communication. Smart systems and infrastructures can exploit portable and context-aware computing technologies to provide any time, any place digitized services on the go. Despite the offered benefits, such as portability, context-sensitivity, and high connectivity, mobile computing also faces some critical challenges. These challenges include resource poverty as well as data security and privacy that need to be addressed to increase the pervasiveness of mobile systems. We propose to provide a self-protection mechanism for mobile devices against the unforeseen security threats that can attack the critical resources of mobile devices. We have unified the concepts of autonomic computing and computer security to develop a framework that enables adaptive security to dynamically configure the security measures of a mobile device. We have developed a framework - an android-based prototype - that supports automation and user decision to protect the critical hardware and software resources of a device. Evaluation results demonstrate (i) framework’s accuracy for runtime detection and minimization of threats, and (ii) framework’s efficiency for device’s resource utilization.