UAMDroid: A user authority manager model for the Android platform

Abstract

Smartphones are taking over the task of Personal Digital Assistant and becoming pocket computers due to their fully customizable software and personalization in terms of the personal data stored on them. Thus, how to prevent the private and sensitive information from exposing to outside world is necessary to be taken into account. However, current smartphone operating systems support only a single user mode which is suitable for the phone owner to work with. In this paper, we present a user authority manager model namely UAMDroid for the Android platform that allows phone owner to specify what applications the phone borrowers should be prohibited to access or uninstall, as well as whether extra applications should be allowed to install. We detail our model that extends the existing Android application framework and describe its prototype of implementation. The performance evaluation shows that UAMDroid only produces a minimal impact on the normal usage of smartphones which is tolerable. Our proposal is lightweight and can efficiently secure personal data in multi-user case. © 2011 Global IT Research Inst.