Towards an Epidemic SMS-based Cellular Botnet

Asem Kitana¹⁺, Issa Traore¹, and Isaac Woungang²⁺

¹Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada
akitana@uvic.ca, itraore@ece.uvic.ca

²Department of Computer Science, Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, Canada
iwoungan@scs.ryerson.ca

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.

Keywords: Cellular botnet, Mobile botnet, Epidemic Command and Control, C&C channel, SMS,

Short Message Service, Malware

+: Corresponding author: Asem Kitana
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Victoria, P.O. Box 1700, STN CSC, Victoria,
BC V8W 2Y2, Canada, Tel: +1-(250) 721.86.97

Journal of Internet Services and Information Security (JISIS), 10(4): 38-58, November 2020

DOI: 10.22667/JISIS.2020.11.30.038 [pdf]