Security Enhanced (SE) Android: Bringing Flexible MAC to Android

Abstract

The Android software stack for mobile devices defines and enforces its own security model for apps through its application-layer permissions model. However, at its foundation, Android relies upon the Linux kernel to protect the system from malicious or flawed apps and to isolate apps from one another. At present, Android leverages Linux discretionary access control (DAC) to enforce these guarantees, despite the known shortcomings of DAC. In this paper, we motivate and describe our work to bring flexible mandatory access control (MAC) to Android by enabling the effective use of Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) for kernel-level MAC and by developing a set of middleware MAC extensions to the Android permissions model. We then demonstrate the benefits of our security enhancements for Android through a detailed analysis of how they mitigate a number of previously published exploits and vulnerabilities for Android. Finally, we evaluate the overheads imposed by our security enhancements.