Abstract

The increasingly open environment of mobile computing sys-
tems such as PDAs and smartphones brings rich applica-
tions and services to mobile users. Accompanied with this
trend is the growing malicious activities against these mobile
systems, such as information leakage, service stealing, and
power exhaustion. Besides the threats posed against individual 
mobile users, these unveiled mobile devices also open
the door for more serious damage such as disabling criti-
cal public cyber physical systems that are connected to the
mobile/wireless infrastructure. The impact of such attacks,
however, has not been fully recognized.

In this talk, we show that mobile devices, even with the
state-of-the-art security mechanisms, are still vulnerable to
a set of carefully crafted attacks. Taking Linux-based cellphones 
as an example, we show that this vulnerability not
only makes it possible to attack individual mobile devices
such as accessing unauthorized resources, disabling prede-
fined security mechanisms, and diverting phone calls, but
also can be exploited to launch distributed denial-of-service
attacks against critical public services such as 911. 


Speaker Bio

Lei Liu is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science Department of George
Mason Univesity. His research interests incude system security,
network application, operation systems and sogrware engineering.