A Light-weight Software Environment for Confining Android Malware

Mobile devices are becoming increasingly general-purpose, and therefore the physical boundary used to separate important resources disappears. As a result, malicious applications (apps) get chances to abuse resources that are available on the mobile platform. In this paper, we propose resource virtualization as a security mechanism for the Android system to strengthen the physical barrier between many types of resources and confine resource-abusing Android apps. The physical resources on a mobile device are virtualized to a different virtual view for selected Android apps. Resource virtualization simulates a partial but consistent virtual view of the Android resources. Therefore, it can not only confine the resource-abusing apps effectively, but also ensure the usability of these apps. We implement a system prototype, RVL, and evaluate it with real-world apps of various types. Our results demonstrate its effectiveness on malicious Android apps and its compatibility and usability on benign Android apps.