Android: Deep look into Dalvik VM

Abstract

Today, Smartphones are very powerful, and many of its applications use wireless multimedia communications. Prevention from the external dangers (threats) has grown up to be a big concern for the experts these days. Android security has become a very important issue because of the unrestricted application it provides and the feature that make it very easy for anyone to develop and published it on Play store. Some work has previously been done on the Android security model, including numerous analyses of the model and frameworks aimed at enforcing security standards. In this article, we explain the architecture of Android operating system, we study and we look for a process model of Android's virtual machine Dalvik. We also study the liaison between the Dalvik virtual machine processes and the connection between the Dalvik processes and the processes of Android through analysis and research the role and the boot process of Zygote in Dalvik virtual machine startup process. This paper discusses an example of attacks based on Dalvik VM. By the end, we propose a simple system that can effectively detect Android's applications issues and solve them.