Mobile antivirus engine in development

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 17 Oct 2003 at 12:48

NTT DoCoMo and Network Associates have developed the basis for an antivirus engine optimised for mobile phones, which they hope will be adopted as an international standard.

The emergence of ever-more sophisticated phones, capable of delivering advanced data services, coupled with the convergence of devices towards communication over IP, can only mean that mobile phone networks will become more vulnerable to virus attacks, and the handsets more attractive targets.

Sal Viveros, Wireless Security Evangelist at Network Associates, said that the appearance of viruses for mobile phone will mirror the first appearance of viruses for computers. Except that while early PC viruses were generally distributed by a floppy disk, mobile phones are already hooked up to national networks.

'The speed at which these threats start to happen will be much faster,' he said. 'But don't expect many threats until late 2004, early 2005.'

He said that mobile phone viruses would be driven by network operators' desire to increase subscriber revenue through the use of data services. This will increase the number of partners supplying such services, and the number of development kits publicly available for programmers to develop them. It's a small step for a virus writer to use one of these as a virus tool kit.

A recent study by Mercer Research predicted that without defences against mobile-borne attacks, by 2005 each incident would cost $2bn, with viruses infecting as much as 30 per cent of the population in just three days.

NTT DoCoMo and Network Associate's compact antivirus engine should be ready before then, Viveros said. 'We've been working with the industry on this for two years already.'

Yet laptops and PCs have large amounts of memory available on which to store the thousands of virus definitions needed for an antivirus program to be able to recognise and respond to ill-intentioned programs - something that mobile phones and many PDAs do not. However, Viveros predicts that the rate of development of memory technology for mobiles will match the industriousness of virus writers.

But it's not just viruses that will be the problem. 'People's attitude to mobile phones is different than their attitude to computers: they expect them to work. And any problems will result in a phone call to the network operator to sort it out,' said Viveros. So the compact antivirus engine will have to offer defence against SMS scams and other hoaxes too.