TSSDroid: realization of an efficient and usable TSS API for the Android software stack

Abstract

The advancement in smartphones capabilities has attracted malware writers to build more sophisticated attacks on these devices. Traditional software-based security mechanisms have failed to provide strong security against these attacks. Similar threats on the PC have been countered using the concepts of Trusted Computing—a highly flexible trust mechanism with strong security properties. However, smartphone platforms have yet to see any Trusted Computing applications—primarily because of the difficulty in adopting this relatively new paradigm of security. In this paper, we present the design of a high-level application programming interface (API) that allows Android-based smartphone application developers to adopt Trusted Computing and use it in their applications without having to learn the intricate details of how Trusted Computing works. The API abstracts away the complexity in using Trusted Computing constructs by offering easy-to-use interfaces for complex tasks. The API has enhanced the usability of Trusted Computing development by significantly reducing the number of lines and complexity of code required to perform these diverse tasks. This paper provides a reference implementation for the proposed API in order to show that the API is efficient in terms of performance overhead. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.