An adaptive push-styled command and control mechanism in mobile botnets

The mobile botnet, developed from the traditional PC-based botnets, has become a practical underlying trend. In this paper, we design a mobile botnet, which exploits a novel command and control (C&C) strategy named Push-Styled C&C. It utilizes Google cloud messaging (GCM) service as the botnet channel. Compared with traditional botnet, Push-Styled C&C avoids direct communications between botmasters and bots, which makes mobile botnets more stealthy and resilient. Since mobile devices users are sensitive to battery power and traffic consumption, Push-Styled botnet also applies adaptive network connection strategy to reduce traffic consumption and cost. To prove the efficacy of our design, we implemented the prototype of Push-Style C&C in Android. The experiment results show that botnet traffic can be concealed in legal GCM traffic with low traffic cost.