Enabling Accurate Data Recovery for Mobile Devices Against Malware Attacks

Mobile computing devices today suffer from various malware attacks. After the malware attack, it is challenging to restore the device’s data back to the exact state right before the attack happens. This challenge would be exacerbated if the malware can compromise the OS of the victim device, obtaining the root privilege. In this work, we aim to design a novel data recovery framework for mobile computing devices, which can ensure recoverability of user data at the corruption point against the strong OS-level malware. By leveraging the version control capability of the cloud server and the hardware features of the local mobile device, we have successfully built MobiDR, the first system which can ensure restoration of data at the corruption point against the malware attacks. Our security analysis and experimental evaluation on the real-world implementation have justified the security and the practicality of MobiDR.