  The growing popularity of smart mobile devices such as smartphones and
tablets has made them an attractive target for cyber-criminals, resulting in a
rapidly growing and evolving mobile threat as attackers experiment with new
business models by targeting mobile users. With the emergence of the first
large-scale mobile botnets, the core network has also become vulnerable to
distributed denial-of-service attacks such as the signaling attack.
Furthermore, complementary access methods such as Wi-Fi and femtocells
introduce additional vulnerabilities for the mobile users as well as the core
network. In this paper, we present the NEMESYS approach to smart mobile network
security. The goal of the NEMESYS project is to develop novel security
technologies for seamless service provisioning in the smart mobile ecosystem,
and to improve mobile network security through a better understanding of the
threat landscape. To this purpose, NEMESYS will collect and analyze information
about the nature of cyber-attacks targeting smart mobile devices and the core
network so that appropriate counter-measures can be taken. We are developing a
data collection infrastructure that incorporates virtualized mobile honeypots
and honeyclients in order to gather, detect and provide early warning of mobile
attacks and understand the modus operandi of cyber-criminals that target mobile
devices. By correlating the extracted information with known attack patterns
from wireline networks, we plan to reveal and identify the possible shift in
the way that cyber-criminals launch attacks against smart mobile devices.
