Executive Summary:

Mobile handheld computing devices like PDAs, Smartphones and Tablet PCs are becoming more popular, and major players in the market of desktop computing are now focusing on this fastest growing emerging market. With the popularity growth, security threats like viruses, trojans, worms, bacteria, spam, and other malware are becoming a serious concern in these devices as well. As a result, security issues of mobile computing are attracting the attention of a large number of researchers both in industry and academia.

Unconventional techniques of Computational Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Immune Systems should be explored to build an optimized and light weight security system. The proposed secure kernel framework will provide adequate security against malware threats and Denial of Service attacks (DoS) on network interfaces (GSM/GPRS and WLAN) of the mobile devices.

The project aims to develop secure kernel framework that enable self-monitoring, and consequently self-healing operation for an operating system of mobile devices. This is expected to produce a fully functional Secure Linux Kernel that will be run on tablet PCs / smartphones. The developed framework will be fully aware of system conditions and resource usage and will schedule different threads intelligently based on each thread/process’ behavior, thus providing a truly secure computing experience in which malware that manages to escape detection by intrusion detection systems gets thwarted in the scheduler.

The project will also result in software that will utilize (Artificial Immune System) AIS and (Intrusion Detection System) IDS for detecting potentially dangerous programs and files. This software will be installable on smartphones. The software will emphasize minimum user intervention while ensuring system security.

The key benefits of this project are given below:

• This project will provide a self-aware, self-monitoring, self-protecting comprehensive kernel framework that will secure mobile computing devices from viruses, trojans, worms, bacteria, spam, and other security threats.

• This framework will also provide a reliable and scalable detection and protection from denial of service attacks (DoS) on network interfaces like GSM/GPRS and WLAN.

• A Unique feature of this host security solution is that it will also provide the network security. All the hosts that will use secure kernel framework will not let the malware to execute and propagate.  So network will also become secure from malware security threats.

• The techniques and methodologies developed during this project are expected to attract several enterprises and mobile OS developing companies to invest in startups and they can use the product as an important framework for further development.