Android antivirus products a big flop, researchers say
Android smartphones and tablets are under attack, and the most popular tools developed to protect them are easily circumvented, according to new research from Northwestern University and the University of North Carolina.
The researchers created technology called DroidChamelon that can be used to perform common obfuscation techniques (simple switches in a virus' binary code or file name, for instance) to blow by security products. It tested DroidChamelon with products from the likes of AVG, Kaspersky, ESET, Symantec and Webroot.
"The results are quite surprising," said Yan Chen, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science (Vaibhav Rastogi, a Ph.D. candidate at Northwestern, and Xuxian Jeng of North Carolina State University, co-authored the work with Chen). "Many of these products are blind to even trivial transformation attacks not involving code-level changes -- operations a teenager could perform."
