Context-Aware Access Control Mechanism on Android Smartphone

Abstract

The proliferating numbers of smartphone applications which access device’s functionalities and resources such as GPS, SMS etc imposes security challenges. In the meantime, the existing security and access control mechanism of smartphone mostly hold a coarsegrained and incomplete access control model. This paper proposes a fine-grained access control; a context-related access control mechanism for Android smartphone platform. Exploiting the current behavior of system and user as well as their interaction, the proposed system enables access control to be made not only at install-time but also at runtime. Moreover, users can impose security policies to their device usage without requiring technical knowledge. By using simple policy and context, the system fulfills necessity of existing access control mechanism within minimum performance overhead.