Authors:
Thomas Zefferer
and
Peter Teufl
Affiliation:
Graz University of Technology, Austria
Keyword(s):
Smartphone, Security, Policy, Assessment, Android.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Information and Systems Security
;
Security and Privacy in Mobile Systems
;
Security and Privacy Policies
;
Security Verification and Validation
Abstract:
For security-critical applications, the integrity and security of end-user devices is of particular importance. This especially applies to mobile applications that use smartphones to process security-critical data. Unfortunately, users often compromise the security of smartphones by disabling security features for convenience reasons or by unintentionally installing malware from untrusted application sources. Mobile device management (MDM) solutions overcome this problem by providing means to centrally manage and configure smartphones. However, MDM is mainly suitable for corporate environments but often cannot be applied in non-corporate
fields of application such as m-banking or m-government. To address this problem, we propose an alternative approach to assure the security and integrity of smartphones. Our approach relies on a device assessor that evaluates the current state of a smartphone according to a security policy. Integration of this device assessor allows smartphone applic
ations to condition the processing of security-critical data on the smartphone’s compliance with a defined security policy. We have shown the practicability of the proposed approach by means of a concrete implementation for the Android platform. We have evaluated this implementation on different Android devices. Obtained results show that our approach constitutes an appropriate alternative for scenarios, in which MDM cannot be applied.
(More)