Understanding the spreading patterns of mobile phone viruses

TL;DR

This paper models mobile phone user mobility to analyze how different types of mobile viruses spread, revealing factors that influence outbreak speed and potential risks as mobile OS market share grows.

Contribution

It introduces a model of user mobility to compare Bluetooth and MMS virus spreading patterns, highlighting the impact of human movement and network structure on outbreaks.

Findings

Bluetooth viruses spread slowly due to mobility, allowing time for intervention.

MMS viruses can infect quickly but are limited by network phase transitions.

Mobile viruses pose increasing threats as OS market share approaches critical thresholds.

Abstract

We model the mobility of mobile phone users to study the fundamental spreading patterns characterizing a mobile virus outbreak. We find that while Bluetooth viruses can reach all susceptible handsets with time, they spread slowly due to human mobility, offering ample opportunities to deploy antiviral software. In contrast, viruses utilizing multimedia messaging services could infect all users in hours, but currently a phase transition on the underlying call graph limits them to only a small fraction of the susceptible users. These results explain the lack of a major mobile virus breakout so far and predict that once a mobile operating system's market share reaches the phase transition point, viruses will pose a serious threat to mobile communications.