A flexible security architecture to support third-party applications on mobile devices

Abstract

The problem of supporting the secure execution of potentially malicious third-party applications has received a considerable amount of attention in the past decade. In this paper we describe a security architecture for mobile devices that supports the flexible integration of a variety of advanced technologies for such secure execution of applications, including run-time monitoring, static verification and proof-carrying code. The architecture also supports the execution of legacy applications that have not been developed to take advantage of our architecture, though it can provide better performance and additional services for applications that are architecture-aware.The proposed architecture has been implemented on a Windows Mobile device with the .NET Compact Framework. It offers a substantial security benefit compared to the standard (state-of-practice) security architecture of such devices, even for legacy applications.