Together with an explosive growth of the mobile applications and emerging of cloud computing concept, mobile cloud computing (MCC) has been introduced to be a potential technology for mobile services. MCC integrates the cloud computing into the mobile environment and overcomes obstacles related to the performance (e.g., battery life, storage, and bandwidth), environment (e.g., heterogeneity, scalability, and availability), and security (e.g., reliability and privacy) discussed in mobile computing. This paper gives a survey of MCC, which helps general readers have an overview of the MCC including the definition, architecture, and applications. The issues, existing solutions, and approaches are presented. In addition, the future research directions of MCC are discussed. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A survey of mobile cloud computing: architecture, applications, and approaches

http://homepage.cs.latrobe.edu.au/sloke/papers/1-s2.0-S0167739X12001318-main.pdf

Mobile cloud computing

The current Internet architecture was founded upon a host-centric communication model, which was appropriate for coping with the needs of the early Internet users. Internet usage has evolved however, with most users mainly interested in accessing (vast amounts of) information, irrespective of its physical location. This paradigm shift in the usage model of the Internet, along with the pressing needs for, among others, better security and mobility support, has led researchers into considering a radical change to the Internet architecture. In this direction, we have witnessed many research efforts investigating Information-Centric Networking (ICN) as a foundation upon which the Future Internet can be built. Our main aims in this survey are: (a) to identify the core functionalities of ICN architectures, (b) to describe the key ICN proposals in a tutorial manner, highlighting the similarities and differences among them with respect to those core functionalities, and (c) to identify the key weaknesses of ICN proposals and to outline the main unresolved research challenges in this area of networking research.

A Survey of Information-Centric Networking Research

Botnets are now the key platform for many Internet attacks, such as spam, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), identity theft, and phishing. Most of the current botnet detection approaches work only on specific botnet command and control (C&C) protocols (e.g., IRC) and structures (e.g., centralized), and can become ineffective as botnets change their C&C techniques. In this paper, we present a general detection framework that is independent of botnet C&C protocol and structure, and requires no a priori knowledge of botnets (such as captured bot binaries and hence the botnet signatures, and C&C server names/addresses). We start from the definition and essential properties of botnets. We define a botnet as a coordinated group of malware instances that are controlled via C&C communication channels. The essential properties of a botnet are that the bots communicate with some C&C servers/peers, perform malicious activities, and do so in a similar or correlated way. Accordingly, our detection framework clusters similar communication traffic and similar malicious traffic, and performs cross cluster correlation to identify the hosts that share both similar communication patterns and similar malicious activity patterns. These hosts are thus bots in the monitored network. We have implemented our BotMiner prototype system and evaluated it using many real network traces. The results show that it can detect real-world botnets (IRC-based, HTTP-based, and P2P botnets including Nugache and Storm worm), and has a very low false positive rate.

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BotMiner: clustering analysis of network traffic for protocol- and structure-independent botnet detection

We present SWAN, a system that boosts the utilization of inter-datacenter networks by centrally controlling when and how much traffic each service sends and frequently re-configuring the network's data plane to match current traffic demand. But done simplistically, these re-configurations can also cause severe, transient congestion because different switches may apply updates at different times. We develop a novel technique that leverages a small amount of scratch capacity on links to apply updates in a provably congestion-free manner, without making any assumptions about the order and timing of updates at individual switches. Further, to scale to large networks in the face of limited forwarding table capacity, SWAN greedily selects a small set of entries that can best satisfy current demand. It updates this set without disrupting traffic by leveraging a small amount of scratch capacity in forwarding tables. Experiments using a testbed prototype and data-driven simulations of two production networks show that SWAN carries 60% more traffic than the current practice.

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Achieving high utilization with software-driven WAN

In this paper, we examine changes in Internet inter-domain traffic demands and interconnection policies. We analyze more than 200 Exabytes of commercial Internet traffic over a two year period through the instrumentation of 110 large and geographically diverse cable operators, international transit backbones, regional networks and content providers. Our analysis shows significant changes in inter-AS traffic patterns and an evolution of provider peering strategies. Specifically, we find the majority of inter-domain traffic by volume now flows directly between large content providers, data center / CDNs and consumer networks. We also show significant changes in Internet application usage, including a global decline of P2P and a significant rise in video traffic. We conclude with estimates of the current size of the Internet by inter-domain traffic volume and rate of annualized inter-domain traffic growth.

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Internet inter-domain traffic

Numerous attacks, such as worms, phishing, and botnets, threaten the availability of the Internet, the integrity of its hosts, and the privacy of its users. A core element of defense against these attacks is anti-virus (AV) software--a service that detects, removes, and characterizes these threats. The ability of these products to successfully characterize these threats has far-reaching effects--from facilitating sharing across organizations, to detecting the emergence of new threats, and assessing risk in quarantine and cleanup. In this paper, we examine the ability of existing host-based anti-virus products to provide semantically meaningful information about the malicious software and tools (or malware) used by attackers. Using a large, recent collection of malware that spans a variety of attack vectors (e.g., spyware, worms, spam), we show that different AV products characterize malware in ways that are inconsistent across AV products, incomplete across malware, and that fail to be concise in their semantics. To address these limitations, we propose a new classification technique that describes malware behavior in terms of system state changes (e.g., files written, processes created) rather than in sequences or patterns of system calls. To address the sheer volume of malware and diversity of its behavior, we provide a method for automatically categorizing these profiles of malware into groups that reflect similar classes of behaviors and demonstrate how behavior-based clustering provides a more direct and effective way of classifying and analyzing Internet malware.

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Automated classification and analysis of internet malware

Antivirus software is one of the most widely used tools for detecting and stopping malicious and unwanted files. However, the long term effectiveness of traditional host-based antivirus is questionable. Antivirus software fails to detect many modern threats and its increasing complexity has resulted in vulnerabilities that are being exploited by malware. This paper advocates a new model for malware detection on end hosts based on providing antivirus as an in-cloud network service. This model enables identification of malicious and unwanted software by multiple, heterogeneous detection engines in parallel, a technique we term 'N-version protection'. This approach provides several important benefits including better detection of malicious software, enhanced forensics capabilities, retrospective detection, and improved deployability and management. To explore this idea we construct and deploy a production quality in-cloud antivirus system called CloudAV. CloudAV includes a lightweight, cross-platform host agent and a network service with ten antivirus engines and two behavioral detection engines. We evaluate the performance, scalability, and efficacy of the system using data from a real-world deployment lasting more than six months and a database of 7220 malware samples covering a one year period. Using this dataset we find that CloudAV provides 35% better detection coverage against recent threats compared to a single antivirus engine and a 98% detection rate across the full dataset. We show that the average length of time to detect new threats by an antivirus engine is 48 days and that retrospective detection can greatly minimize the impact of this delay. Finally, we relate two case studies demonstrating how the forensics capabilities of CloudAV were used by operators during the deployment.

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CloudAV: N-version antivirus in the network cloud

A system is provided for detecting, analyzing and quarantining unwanted files in a network environment. A host agent residing on a computing device in the network environment detects a new file introduced to the computing device and sends the new file to a network service for analysis. The network service is accessible to computing devices in the network environment. An architecture for the network service may include: a request dispatcher configured to receive a candidate file for inspection from a given computing device in the network environment and distribute the candidate file to one or more of a plurality of detection engines, where the detection engines operate in parallel to analyze the candidate file and output a report regarding the candidate file; and a result aggregator configured to receive reports from each of the detection engines regarding the candidate file and aggregates the reports in accordance with an aggregation algorithm.

Network service for the detection, analysis and quarantine of malicious and unwanted files

Modern mobile devices continue to approach the capabilities and extensibility of standard desktop PCs. Unfortunately, these devices are also beginning to face many of the same security threats as desktops. Currently, mobile security solutions mirror the traditional desktop model in which they run detection services on the device. This approach is complex and resource intensive in both computation and power. This paper proposes a new model whereby mobile antivirus functionality is moved to an off-device network service employing multiple virtualized malware detection engines. Our argument is that it is possible to spend bandwidth resources to significantly reduce on-device CPU, memory, and power resources. We demonstrate how our in-cloud model enhances mobile security and reduces on-device software complexity, while allowing for new services such as platform-specific behavioral analysis engines. Our benchmarks on Nokia's N800 and N95 mobile devices show that our mobile agent consumes an order of magnitude less CPU and memory while also consuming less power in common scenarios compared to existing on-device antivirus software.

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Jon Oberheide

Papers

Internet inter-domain traffic

Automated classification and analysis of internet malware

CloudAV: N-version antivirus in the network cloud

Network service for the detection, analysis and quarantine of malicious and unwanted files

Virtualized in-cloud security services for mobile devices