Automation of Smartphone Traffic Generation in a Virtualized Environment

TL;DR

This paper introduces a framework that automates smartphone application traffic generation in virtualized environments, enabling scalable testing of traffic analysis engines without physical devices.

Contribution

It presents a novel method to automate real mobile app traffic in virtual environments for testing DPI engines, avoiding the need for physical hardware.

Findings

Automated real-time Skype call traffic in a virtual setup.

Effective testing of DPI engines without physical devices.

Framework supports regression and functional testing.

Abstract

Scalable and comprehensive analysis of rapidly evolving mobile device application traffic is extremely important but a challenging problem for the Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) engines to perform effective policy management. We present a test framework in which a test driver can automate/orchestrate traffic generation by invoking appropriate method (intent) of real mobile applications (as opposed to traffic replay) in regression or functional testing of mobile application traffic analysis engines in a virtualized environment, without real hardware. We demonstrate the concept by automating a real-time Skype call through a DPI engine in a virtual test setup using Android VMs.