The Multi-level Security for the Android OS

Recently, the Android smartphone has become a frequent target of attackers. The smartphone provides personalized services such as finance and healthcare application, so attackers may invade the user's privacy by compromising the smartphone. The Android platform has permission based security model, but there are several vulnerabilities. First, when components communicate through message passing mechanism, attackers can eavesdrop or intercept the message. It may lead to leakage of user's sensitive information. Second, a non-privileged caller can access more privileged callee by exploiting vulnerable interfaces. In this paper, we propose multi-level security framework to protect against the attacks described above. Our security framework assigns security level to all applications, and it regulates communication between components at runtime.