Markus Jakobsson - PARC blog

Will mobile payments usher in a new era of crime?

13 October 2009 | Markus Jakobsson

With the recent news that Amazon launched a mobile payments service, I have to wonder if fraud will go through the roof. But Amazon wisely invented 1-Click payments to reduce user burden, and soon this feature will apply to mobile users. All of this is very nice and convenient for the user. Except if you're among the 8+ million users a year who lose their mobile phones. Then it becomes very nice and convenient for whoever finds your phone.

A central nervous system for automatically detecting malware

9 September 2009 | Markus Jakobsson

It’s nearly impossible for anti-virus protectors to keep up with the pace of malware – producing descriptions of what that malware looks or acts like – around the clock, especially with close to a million new and unique malware instances every day. But what if you can use the circumstances of software installations and executions to tell what kind of software it is without even looking at the code? This information can auto-inform anti-virus protectors, and can be used to provide immediate advice to a client machine, which turns to the “centralized [malware] nervous system” to ask whether a particular piece of code is safe to install or not.

Fear mobile malware

1 September 2009 | Markus Jakobsson

Online criminals have many tools for committing fraud and theft, including phishing and, increasingly, malware. A more acute problem is mobile malware, which will pose a serious threat to mobile communications as smartphone use explodes. The inherent limitations of smartphones – power, memory, bandwidth – make most anti-virus tools unsuitable once the rate of malware instances reaches a certain threshold, because smartphones can't handle the updates that PCs currently have to. So what happens when malware authors start developing viruses for smartphones at the rate they currently do for personal computers? We may not have to wait long to find out, because mobile platforms are rich with data and are convenient payment platforms ripe for defrauding. We must find better solutions before it's too late. And we can't use current strategies to combat the problem, because the mobile context is so much more vulnerable and resource-constrained.

Experimenting on Mechanical Turk: 5 How Tos

21 July 2009 | Markus Jakobsson

Performing human-subjects experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk offers many benefits, including very low experiment costs, quick turn-around rates, and relatively simple approvals from human subjects boards. But you have to be careful to avoid bias and error...