ThinAV: Truly Lightweight Mobile Cloud-based Anti-malware

This paper introduces ThinAV, an anti-malware system for Android that uses pre-existing web-based file scanning services for malware detection. The goal in developing ThinAV was to assess the feasibility of providing real-time anti-malware scanning over a wide area network where resource limitation is a factor. As a result, our research provides a necessary counterpoint to many of the big-budget, resource-intensive idealized solutions that have been suggested in the area of cloud-based security. The evaluation of ThinAV shows that it functions well over a wide area network, resulting in a system which is highly practical for providing anti-malware security on smartphones.

Author(s):

Chris Jarabek    
University of Calgary
Canada

David Barrera    
Carleton University
Canada

John Aycock    
University of Calgary
Canada