Context-Related Security Control Mechanisms on Android Platform

Abstract

The revolution of mobile phones era has brought the innovative smartphones technology. As a result, research addressing information access in smartphones environment has proliferated. The important feature in security of smartphones is to restrict the behavior of users using applications and services. In the meantime, the existing security mechanism on Android mostly holds a coarse-grained and incomplete security model. To enhance this into fine-grained manner, it is practical to use contextrelated information to specify precisely what resources and services an application should be authorized access to. While the concept of contextrelated security mechanism is not new, challenges are facing to adopt this technology to its full potential. In this paper, we attempt to review the existing finegrained context-aware models. These approaches differ regarding of how control is initiated e.g. via SMS messages, how context is activated e.g. manually or automatically etc. From this study, we intend to build simpler as well as clear security control mechanism based on user context such as access patterns of resource or working set. We also aim to apply classification technique in the decision making process for access control without user intervention. This paper is initial endeavor of our research proposal.