Sandia National Laboratories has announced that in its ongoing efforts to “prevent and mitigate disruptions to computer networks on the Internet,” its researchers and scientists “have turned their attention to smartphones and other hand-held computing devices. To do so they have linked together 300,000 virtual hand-held computing devices running Android operating systems with the goal of studying large networks of smartphones to find ways to make them more reliable and secure.

Expectations are that the work and research will yield a software tool designed to allow others involved in cyber research “to model similar environments and to study behaviors of smartphone networks. Ultimately, the tool will enable the computing industry to better protect hand-held devices from malicious intent.”

Dr. David Fritz, a member of the Senior Technical Staff at Sandia said, “Smartphone’s are now ubiquitous and used as general-purpose computing devices as much as desktop or laptop computers. But even though they are easy targets, no one appears to be studying than at the scale we’re attempting.”

John Floren, a computer scientist at Sandia and another member of the Senior Technical Staff said, “You can’t defend against something you don’t understand. The larger the scale the better, since more computer nodes offer more data for the researchers to observe and study.”

In describing the main challenge in studying Android-based machines the press release from Sandia notes the “sheer complexity of the software. Google, which developed the Android operating system, wrote 14 million lines of code into the software, and the system runs on top of a Linux kernel, which more than doubles the amount of code.”  Dr. Fritz noted that, “It’s possible for something to go wrong on the scale of a big wireless network because of a coding mistake in an operating system or an application, and it’s very hard to diagnose and fix. You can’t possibly read through 15 million lines of code and understand every possible interaction between all these devices and the network.”

Keith Vanderveen, manager of Sandia’s Scalable and Secure Systems Research department, said, “You could also extend the technology to other platforms besides Android. Apple iOS, for instance, could take advantage of our body of knowledge and the toolkit we’re developing. Sandia also plans to use MegaDroid to explore issues of data protection and data leakage which concerns government agencies such as the departments of Defense and Homeland Security.”