Two boffins are hoping that their work into mobile rootkits will inspire the security industry pull finger and improve methods sniff them out.

Liviu Iftode and Vinod Ganapathy, who teach in the computer science department at Rutgers University in New Brunswick have just revealed findings that confirm that smartphones are just as vulnerable to rootkits as their desktop counterparts.

According to SCMagazineUS.com the boffins are motivated by the fact that smartphone operating systems are becoming just as complicated as desktops. Our study has shown that rootkits are just as much of a threat for smartphones as desktops," he said.

Rootkits on mobile phones conceivably could intercept or divert phone calls, drain the device's battery, identify a user's location by compromising GPS functionality or leverage Bluetooth capabilities to determine who a user is with at a given time.

This is all a bit odd as there are no known in-the-wild rootkits affecting mobile devices, but the two claim that such a day is not far off. They say that their work is a call for defences as the work to develop the right answer could take years.