CAVAEva: An Engineering Platform for Evaluating Commercial Anti-malware Applications on Smartphones

The pervasiveness of mobile devices, such as Android and iOS smartphones, and the type of data available and stored on these devices make them an attractive target for cyber-attackers. For example, mobile malware authors seek to compromise devices to collect sensitive information and data from the smartphones. To mitigate such a threat, a number of online scanning platforms exist to evaluate existing anti-malware applications. However, existing platforms have a number of limitations, such as configuration inflexibility. Also, in practice, the code protection and different structures complicate efforts to effectively evaluate different commercial anti-malware software in a configurable and unified platform. Hence in this work, we design CAVAEva, an engineering platform for commercial anti-malware application evaluation, in which users/researchers have the capability to configure the platform based on their needs and requirements. In particular, we show how to design such a platform and introduce its performance. Specifically, we present a comparative summary of seven commercial anti-malware software, and collect the feedback from a user study. Experimental results demonstrate the potential utility of our platform in evaluating commercial anti-malware software in a real-world smartphone deployment.