An Adaptive Push-Styled Command and Control Mechanism in Mobile Botnets

作者：CHEN Wei; GONG Peihua; YU Le; YANG Geng College of Computer; Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications; Nanjing; Jiangsu; China

来源：Wuhan University Journal of Natural Sciences, 2013, (05): 427-434.

• mobile botnet
• push style
• Google cloud messaging (GCM)
• adaptive connection

The mobile botnet, developed from the traditional PC-based botnets, has become a practical underlying trend. In this paper, we design a mobile botnet, which exploits a novel command and control (C&C) strategy named Push-Styled C&C. It utilizes Google cloud messaging (GCM) service as the botnet channel. Compared with traditional botnet, Push-Styled C&C avoids direct communications between botmasters and bots, which makes mobile botnets more stealthy and resilient. Since mobile devices users are sensitive to battery power and traffic consumption, Push- Styled botnet also applies adaptive network connection strategy to reduce traffic consumption and cost. To prove the efficacy of our design, we implemented the prototype of Push-Style C&C in Android. The experiment results show that botnet traffic can be concealed in legal GCM traffic with low traffic cost.

• 出版日期2013-10-24
• 单位南京邮电大学