Machigar Ongtang
ABSTRACT
The penetration of cellular networks worldwide and emergence of smart phones has led to a revolution in mobile content. Users consume diverse content when, for example, exchanging photos, playing games, browsing websites, and viewing multimedia. Current phone platforms provide protections for user privacy, the cellular radio, and the integrity of the OS itself. However, few offer protections to protect the content once it enters the phone. For example, MP3-based MMS or photo content placed on Android smart phones can be extracted and shared with impunity. In this paper, we explore the requirements and enforcement of digital rights management (DRM) policy on smart phones. An analysis of the Android market shows that DRM services should ensure: a) protected content is accessible only by authorized phones b) content is only accessible by provider-endorsed applications, and c) access is regulated by contextual constraints, e.g., used for a limited time, a maximum number of viewings, etc. The Porscha system developed in this work places content proxies and reference monitors within the Android middleware to enforce DRM policies embedded in received content. A pilot study controlling content obtained over SMS, MMS, and email illustrates the expressibility and enforcement of Porscha policies. Our experiments demonstrate that Porscha is expressive enough to articulate needed DRM policies and that their enforcement has limited impact on performance.
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Index Terms
- Porscha: policy oriented secure content handling in Android
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Reviews
Eduardo B. Fernandez
There is little protection for the content downloaded to cell phones. In Android, it is up to the programmers to define what their applications can access-malicious applications can exploit this in order to access unauthorized data. The Open Mobile Alliance (OMA), a consortium of phone manufacturers, defined digital rights management (DRM) requirements to enforce control of access to content. However, its granularity is too coarse: it does not protect content that is already on a phone because the rights are assigned to the whole phone, not to specific applications. To improve this situation, this paper proposes a policy-based access control system (Porscha) that protects the content when it is delivered to the phone and once it is on the phone. This clear and well-written paper provides a concise survey of the main system and application features of Android architectures, with particular emphasis on security. It starts with a description of a phone's uses, trying to understand its threats and define security requirements for the system; a set of DRM policies is defined from this analysis. The authors then analyze how content is delivered and used by applications, as well as any threats. They define a trusted computing base (TCB) and consider the network to be untrusted because of the deficiencies of current encryption approaches. In order to protect content in transit, they define a type of public key infrastructure (PKI) that uses identity-based public keys. They also propose a mediator to enforce policies for the content on the phone. The paper evaluates the cost (overhead) of policy enforcement and finds it to be reasonable. The authors' security evaluation includes protecting the private key, dealing with recipients without Porscha, and their assumptions about the level of trust on the platform, including Android and the Linux kernel. They also discuss Porscha as an access control system for content. The paper includes a good set of references. This excellent paper will be very useful to readers who work in this field or who are concerned with the security of wireless applications. Online Computing Reviews Service
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