Novel Method for Safeguarding Social Network Communication via Collaborative Antivirus Techniques and the Cloud

摘要

Smartphones are strongly associated with everyday life, and users increasingly depend on their smartphones for frequent and essential tasks. This makes smartphones a prime target for attackers to distribute their malware in order to damage smartphones and steal sensitive user data. Unlike desktop computers, implementing efficient and high-performance security mechanisms on smartphones is a major challenge as smartphones have strict resource constraints in terms of memory size, computational ability, and energy. Implementing security mechanisms that consume a significant percentage of mobile resources will negatively affect the performance of mobile devices. One of the popular methods attackers use to access a victim's device is sending malicious URLs, images, and documents through social media. Attackers can then gain access to a user’s sensitive data stored in their mobile device, such as their banking information, or remotely control and access the mobile device’s camera, microphone, and other resources. The model presented here improves the SocialAV [1] solution proposed in the reviewed literature by using cloud computing and a different collaborative approach. The objective of this research is to implement a secure environment for social networks (secure chatting) that protects social network members from malicious content by running a lightweight and real-time antivirus program. The proposed model is dedicated to scanning malicious content within a social network and making its security services available to all users, regardless of their mobile device's capabilities.