MOSES: supporting operation modes on smartphones

Abstract

Smartphones are very effective tools for increasing the productivity of business users. With their increasing computational power and storage capacity, smartphones allow end users to perform several tasks and be always updated while on the move. As a consequence, end users require that their personal smartphones are connected to their work IT infrastructure. Companies are willing to support employee-owned smartphones because of the increase in productivity of their employees. However, smartphone security mechanisms have been discovered to offer very limited protection against malicious applications that can leak data stored on them. This poses a serious threat to sensitive corporate data. In this paper we present MOSES, a policy-based framework for enforcing software isolation of applications and data on the Android platform. In MOSES, it is possible to define distinct security profiles within a single smartphone. Each security profile is associated with a set of policies that control the access to applications and data. One of the main characteristics of MOSES is the dynamic switching from one security profile to another.