L4Android: A generic operating system framework for secure smartphones

Abstract

Smartphones became many people's primary means of communication. Emerging applications such as Near Field Communication require new levels of security that cannot be enforced by current smartphone operating systems. Therefore vendors resort to hardware extensions that have limitations in flexibility and increase the bill of materials. In this work we present a generic operating system framework that does away with the need for such hardware extensions. We encapsulate the original smartphone operating system in a virtual machine. Our framework allows for highly secure applications to run side-by-side with the virtual machine. It is based on a state-of-the-art microkernel that ensures isolation between the virtual machine and secure applications. We evaluate our framework by sketching how it can be used to solve four problems in current smartphone security. © 2011 ACM.