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AppShield: Enabling Multi-entity Access Control Cross Platforms for Mobile App Management

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Security and Privacy in Communication Networks (SecureComm 2016)

Abstract

Bring-your-own-device (BYOD) is getting popular. Diverse personal devices are used to access enterprise resources, and deployment of the solutions with customized operating system (OS) dependency will thus be restricted. Moreover, device utilization for both business and personal purposes creates new threats involving leakage of sensitive data. As for functionalities, a BYOD solution should isolate an arbitrary number of entities, such as those relating to business and personal uses and provide fine-grained access control on multi-entity management. Existing BYOD solutions lack in these aspects; we propose a system, called AppShield, which supports multi-entity management and role-based access control with file-level granularity, apart from local data sharing/isolation. AppShield includes (1) application rewriting framework for Android apps, which builds Mobile Application Management (MAM) features into app automatically with complete mediation, (2) cross-platform proxy-based data access mechanism, which can enforce arbitrary access control policies. The fully functional controller with data proxy is implemented for both Android and iOS. AppShield allows for enterprise policy management without modifying device OS. The evaluation shows that AppShield is successful at policy enforcement and is reliable. It induces little impact on application’s performance and size, for example, our app rewriting introduces less than 5% code size increment in over 95% apps in our evaluation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.webshield.appshield&hl=en.

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Acknowledgments

We thank our reviewers for their valuable comments. This paper was made possible by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 61472209, by the U.S. National Science Foundation under Grant CNS-1408790. The statements made herein are solely the responsibility of the authors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, 60208, USA

    Zhengyang Qu, Yan Chen & Wangjun Hong

  2. Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

    Guanyu Guo & Zhengyue Shao

  3. University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, 53706, USA

    Vaibhav Rastogi

  4. University of California, Davis, CA, 95616, USA

    Hao Chen

Authors
  1. Zhengyang Qu
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  2. Guanyu Guo
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  3. Zhengyue Shao
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  4. Vaibhav Rastogi
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  5. Yan Chen
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  6. Hao Chen
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  7. Wangjun Hong
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Zhengyang Qu .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Singapore Management University, Singapore, Singapore

    Robert Deng

  2. Jinan University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China

    Jian Weng

  3. University at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York, USA

    Kui Ren

  4. SRI International, Menlo Park, California, USA

    Vinod Yegneswaran

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© 2017 ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering

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Qu, Z. et al. (2017). AppShield: Enabling Multi-entity Access Control Cross Platforms for Mobile App Management. In: Deng, R., Weng, J., Ren, K., Yegneswaran, V. (eds) Security and Privacy in Communication Networks. SecureComm 2016. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 198. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59608-2_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59608-2_1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-59607-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-59608-2

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