Appstore security: 5 lines of defence against malware

The booming smartphone industry has a special way of delivering software to end-users: appstores. Popular appstores have hundreds of thousands of apps for anything from online banking to mosquito repellent, and the most popular stores (Apple Appstore, Google Android market) claim billions of app downloads. But appstores have not escaped the attention of cyber attackers. Over the course of 2011 numerous malicious apps were found, across a variety of smartphone models. Using malicious apps, attackers can easily tap into the vast amount of private data processed on smartphones such as confidential business emails, location data, phone calls, SMS messages and so on. Starting from a threat model for appstores, this paper identifies five lines of defence that must be in place to address malware in appstores: app review, reputation, kill-switches, device security and jails.

Published
Authors
Dr. Marnix Dekker, CISA, Dr. Giles Hogben
Language
English

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