Volume 10 - Issue 4
Towards an Epidemic SMS-based Cellular Botnet
- Asem Kitana
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada
akitana@uvic.ca
- Issa Traore
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada
itraore@ece.uvic.ca
- Isaac Woungang
Department of Computer Science Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, Canada
iwoungan@scs.ryerson.ca
Keywords: Cellular botnet, Mobile botnet, Epidemic Command and Control, C&C channel, SMS, Short Message Service, Malware
Abstract
Attacks and threats against cellular devices such as botnets are becoming more and more prominent.
Focusing on short message services (SMS) phishing attacks, this paper proposes the design
of a cellular botnet that initiates such attack and studies its epidemic behavior using three random
graphs models, namely the Barabasi–and-Albert topology (BAT), Erdos-and-Reyni topology (ERT),
and Watts-and-Strogatz topology (WST). Simulation results show that: (1) Compared to BAT and
WST, ERT is the best topology for enhancing the epidemic behavior of the proposed cellular botnet,
(2) the BAT topology is less resilient to devices’ failures compared to the ERT and WST topologies.
In the end, an effective holistic multi-tier defense strategy against the proposed epidemic SMS-based
cellular botnet is presented.