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Threat of renovated .NET viruses to mobile devices

Published: 28 March 2008 Publication History

Abstract

This research investigates the threat .NET viruses pose to mobile devices supporting the .NET Compact Framework. The focus is on (1) the feasibility of transforming, via renovation, a .NET virus to comply with the .NET Compact Framework and (2) deciding if the transformed virus can succeed in infecting a mobile device supporting the .NET Compact Framework. A formal model to identify non .NET CF compliant source code and to derive transformation rules is presented and characterized. The model was used to transform a test suite of .NET viruses to comply with the .NET Compact Framework. These transformed viruses successfully infected files on two mobile devices. Four desktop virus detectors were tested to detect the .NET viruses and their transformed versions. Three of the four did worse in detecting the transformed versions than on the original .NET version. The research shows that .NET viruses pose an apparent and realizable threat to mobile devices supporting the .NET Compact Framework.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
ACMSE '08: Proceedings of the 46th annual ACM Southeast Conference
March 2008
548 pages
ISBN:9781605581057
DOI:10.1145/1593105
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 28 March 2008

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ACM SE08
ACM SE08: ACM Southeast Regional Conference
March 28 - 29, 2008
Alabama, Auburn

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