Building a Cloud-based Mobile Application Testbed Hamilton Turner, Jules White, Jeff Reed, José Galindo Electrical and Computer Engineering, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, USA Adam Porter Dept. of Computer Science, University of Maryland, USA Madhav Marathe, Anil Vullikanti Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, USA Aniruddha Gokhale Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, Vanderbilt University, USA ABSTRACT A proliferation of mobile smartphone platforms, including Android devices, has triggered a rise in mobile application development for a diverse set of situations. Testing of these smartphone applications can be exceptionally difficult, due to the challenges of orchestrating production-scale quantities of smartphones, such as difficulty in managing thousands of sensory inputs to each individual smartphone device. This work presents the Android Tactical Application Assessment and Knowledge (ATAACK) Cloud, which utilizes a cloud computing environment to allow smartphone-based security, sensing, and social networking researchers to rapidly use model-based tools to provision experiments with a combination of 1,000+ emulated smartphone instances and tens of actual devices. The ATAACK Cloud will provide a large-scale smartphone application research testbed. INTRODUCTION Emerging Trends and Challenges for Mobile & Social Computing Researchers. A growing trend in computing systems is the use of smartphone computing platforms, such as Google Android, the iPhone, and Windows Phone 7, as the basis of distributed mobile and social applications. This trend towards the use of smartphone platforms has been driven, in part, by their fast proliferation. For example, in the 3Q of 2010, Apple shipped approximately 2 million PCs and the largest market share holder, HP, shipped 4.59 million (Chou, O’Donnell, & Shrirer, 2010). During that same quarter, Apple shipped over almost 13.5 million iOS devices and other manufacturers shipped 20.5 million Android devices (Tudor & Pettey, 2010). Both smartphone computing platforms sold 3 to 4 times as many devices as the leading PC manufacturer. A diverse set of research communities has begun intensive exploration into the ramifications of the ubiquitous computing environment created by the pervasiveness of smartphones. For example, researchers are investigating the intersections of mobile computing and social networks using a variety of techniques (N Eagle & Pentland, 2005; Kempe, Kleinberg, & Tardos, 2003; Miluzzo et al., 2008). Security researchers are looking at the ramifications of emerging malware threats to mobile computing platforms (H. Kim, Smith, & Shin, 2008; Lawton, 2008; Leavitt, 2005). Other investigators have focused on mechanisms to monitor the physical world using mobile crowdsourcing (Alt, Shirazi, Schmidt, Kramer, & Nawaz, 2010; Nathan Eagle, 2009; T. Yan, Marzilli, Holmes, Ganesan, & Corner, 2009), citizen scientists (Aoki et al., 2008; Burke et al., 2006), and opportunistic sensing (A T Campbell, Eisenman, & Lane, 2008; Mohan, Padmanabhan, & Ramjee, 2008; Tong, Zhao, & Adireddy, 2003). Although there are a large number of research communities that are investigating smartphone-based computing paradigms, researchers are limited in the scale and accuracy of the systems that they can build, emulate, and test (Ahmed Alazzawe, Alazzawe, Wijesekera, & Dantu, 2009; Chintapatla, Goulart, &