Sandia lab fires up 300,000 virtual Android devices to test out security
Researchers with the Sandia National Laboratory have tied together 300,000 virtual Android-based devices in an effort to study the security and reliability of large smartphone networks.
The Android project, dubbed MegaDroid, is carefully insulated from other networks at the Labs and the outside world, but can be built up into a realistic computing environment, the researchers stated. That environment might include a full domain name service (DNS), an Internet relay chat (IRC) server, a web server and multiple subnets, said John Floren a computer scientist with the project.
MegaDroid features what Floren called a "spoof" Global Positioning System (GPS) experiment. Researchers created simulated GPS data of a smartphone user in an urban environment, an important experiment since smartphones and such key features as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capabilities are highly location-dependent and thus could easily be controlled and manipulated by rogue actors Floren said.
