MegaDroid to Help Secure Handheld Devices

Building on the success of earlier work that focused on virtual Linux and Windows desktop systems, Sandia National Laboratory cyber researchers have now linked together 300,000 virtual handheld computing devices using the Android operating system. The Android project, dubbed MegaDroid, is expected to help the laboratory and others who struggle with malicious computer networks on the Internet, particularly as the problem relates to smartphones. In this video, Sandia cyber researchers John Floren and David Fritz discuss MegaDroid.

Transcript

00:00:00 [Music] so what we've done here at Sandia is we've created a platform that we call megga Droid and the real object here is to be able to simulate hundreds thousands or even up to a million Android devices like you would have on your smartphone what makes studying Android phones especially important is that these devices are general purpose

00:00:22 Computing devices that people carry around with them you to the supermarket to the library these other places and they're loaded with sensors with a phone it's got a GPS sensor it's got a camera it's got an accelerometer to tell how fast you're moving all all these various sensors and to actually provide good Fidelity for a simulation environment we need to simulate the inputs to these

00:00:42 sensors as well one of the things we've done is we've written a a fake GPS radio for all the Android phones and we can feed these phones GPS data from simulated street map data of people walking around a city for example and so the Android device thinks that it's moving across City making its way through the streets of town and if you were to connect to this Android device

00:01:05 and look at it bring up the maps application you would see the little icon for your phone moving across the screen these things can make them especially vulnerable to uh a number of other attack vectors so say for example you're at the library and you use the library's uh free Wi-Fi and your phone gets infected that way but then your phone can talk to other phones that you

00:01:28 pass by and perhaps infect these other phones cane is this cluster that we've put together out of commodity PCS so it's very low cost and still has very powerful hardware and it's specifically targeted at running large numbers of virtual machines uh the whole machine as far as clusters go is a a relatively inexpensive uh cluster and that was by

00:01:50 Design because the goal is to Target these lower cost systems so that the end user when this product is finally released can set this up in a smaller scale just on their desktop Workstation or just a small number of machines it can improve our understanding of these systems it can help improve the security of systems and it's the kind of thing that a small startup may not have the

00:02:09 resources to put together or many large companies may not really have the incentive to do and so we're going to try to release the software make it available to the public and hopefully get other people involved in using it Sandia is uniquely situated to do this sort of large scale work because we have a long history of doing capacity type cluster Sim simulations very large scale

00:02:32 simulations of of All Sorts so we have a lot of really good human and machine resources for doing large scale simulations of all sorts of things