The April 2009 issue of Sciencexpress has tabled a research paper with the title of Understanding the Spreading Patterns of Mobile Phone Viruses.

The paper was written by Pu Wang, Marta C. González, César A. Hidalgo and Albert-László Barabási.

We model the mobility of mobile phone users to study the fundamental spreading patterns characterizing a mobile virus outbreak. We find that while Bluetooth viruses can reach all susceptible handsets with time, they spread slowly due to human mobility, offering ample opportunities to deploy antiviral software. In contrast, viruses utilizing multimedia messaging services could infect all users in hours, but currently a phase transition on the underlying call graph limits them to only a small fraction of the susceptible users. These results explain the lack of a major mobile virus breakout so far and predict that once a mobile operating system’s market share reaches the phase transition point, viruses will pose a serious threat to mobile communications.

Lacking a standardised operating system, traditional cellphones have been relatively immune to viruses. Smartphones, however, can share programs and data with each other, representing a fertile ground for virus writers. Indeed, since 2004 more than 420 smartphone viruses have been identified, the newer ones having reached a state of sophistication that took computer viruses about two decades to arrive at. While smartphones currently represent less than 5% of the mobile market, given their reported 150% annual growth rate they are poised to become the dominant communication device in the near future, raising the possibility of virus breakouts that could overshadow the disruption caused by traditional computer viruses.

All in all it is a very interisting bit of research that is well worth further ongoing investigation. You can read the report in full here.