Generating Lightweight Behavioral Signature for Malware Detection in People-Centric Sensing

People-centric sensing (PCS) is an emerging paradigm of sensor network which turns daily used mobile devices (such as smartphones and PDAs) to sensors. It is promising but faces severe security problems. As smartphones are already and will keep up to be attractive targets to attackers, even more, with strong connectivity and homogeneous applications, all mobile devices in PCS will risk being infected by malware more rapidly. Even worse, attackers usually obfuscate their malwares in order to avoid simple (syntactic signature based) detection. Thus, more intelligent (behavioral signature based) detection is needed. But in the field of network security, the state-of-the-art behavioral signature—behavior graph—is too complicated to be used in mobile devices. This paper proposes a novel behavioral signature generation system—SimBehavior—to generate lightweight behavioral signature for malware detection in PCS. Generated lightweight behavioral signature is a bit like regex (regular expression) rules. And thus, unlike malware detection using behavior graph is NP-Complete, using our lightweight behavioral signature is efficient and very suitable for malware detection in PCS. Our experimental results show that SimBehavior can extract behavioral signatures effectively, and generated lightweight behavioral signatures can be used to detect new malware samples in PCS efficiently and effectively.