A Social Network Based Patching Scheme for Worm Containment in Cellular Networks

Recently, cellular phone networks have begun allowing third-party applications to run over certain open-API phone operating systems such as Windows Mobile, Iphone and Google's Android platform. However, with this increased openness, the fear of rogue programs written to propagate from one phone to another becomes ever more real. This paper proposes a counter mechanism to contain the propagation of a mobile worm at the earliest stage by patching an optimal set of selected phones. The counter-mechanism continually extracts a social relationship graph between mobile phones via an analysis of the network traffic.