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As smartphones are becoming more complex and powerful to provide better functionalities, concerns are increasing regarding security threats against their users. Since smartphones use a software architecture similar to PCs, they are vulnerable to the same classes of security risks. Unfortunately, smartphones are constrained by their limited resources that prevent the integration of advanced security monitoring solutions that work with traditional PCs. We propose Secloud, a cloud-based security solution for smartphone devices. Secloud emulates a registered smartphone device inside a designated cloud and keeps it synchronized by continuously passing the device inputs and network connections to the cloud. This allows Secloud to perform a resource-intensive security analysis on the emulated replica that would otherwise be infeasible to run on the device itself. We demonstrate the practical feasibility of Secloud through a prototype for Android devices and illustrate its resource effectiveness by comparing it with on-device solutions.

Recent research has made great strides in the field of detecting botnets. However, botnets of all kinds continue to plague the Internet, as many ISPs and organizations do not deploy these techniques. We aim to mitigate this state by creating a very low-cost method of detecting infected bot host. Our approach is to leverage the botnet detection work carried out by some organizations to easily locate collaborating bots elsewhere. We created BotMosaic as a countermeasure to IRC-based botnets. BotMosaic relies on captured bot instances controlled by a watermarker, who inserts a particular pattern into their network traffic. This pattern can then be detected at a very low cost by client organizations and the watermark can be tuned to provide acceptable false-positive rates. A novel feature of the watermark is that it is inserted collaboratively into the flows of multiple captured bots at once, in order to ensure the signal is strong enough to be detected. BotMosaic can also be used to detect stepping stones and to help trace back to the botmaster. It is content agnostic and can operate on encrypted traffic. We evaluate BotMosaic using simulations and a testbed deployment.

The Ninja project seeks to enable the broad innovation of robust, scalable, distributed Internet services, and to permit the emerging class of extremely heterogeneous devices to seamlessly access these services. Our architecture consists of four basic elements: bases, which are powerful workstation cluster environments with a software platform that simplifies scalable service construction; units, which are the devices by which users access the services; active proxies, which are transformational elements that are used for unit- or service-specific adaptation; and paths, which are an abstraction through which units, services, and active proxies are composed.