SEIP: Simple and efficient integrity protection for open mobile platforms

Abstract

SEIP is a simple and efficient but yet effective solution for the integrity protection of real-world cellular phone platforms, which is motivated by the disadvantages of applying traditional integrity models on these performance and user experience constrained devices. The major security objective of SEIP is to protect trusted services and resources (e.g., those belonging to cellular service providers and device manufacturers) from third party code. We propose a set of simple integrity protection rules based upon open mobile operating system environments and respective application behaviors. Our design leverages the unique features of mobile devices, such as service convergence and limited permissions of user installed applications, and easily identifies the borderline between trusted and untrusted domains on mobile platform. Our approach thus significantly simplifies policy specifications while still achieves a high assurance of platform integrity. SEIP is deployed within a commercially available Linux-based smartphone and demonstrates that it can effectively prevent certain malware. The security policy of our implementation is less than 20kB, and a performance study shows that it is lightweight. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.