Improving security Solutions in modern Smartphones

Abstract

Since the introduction of modern smartphones in 2007, their popularity has soared, and today smartphones are ubiquitous. People all over the world have embraced new ways to work, shop and socialize by means of their smartphone. Resulting from this is that all sorts of personal and sensitive data is communicated through, and stored on the devices.Whether the data is business documents or payment card details, it results in the smartphone being an attractive target for maliciously intended people.This thesis aims to identify new solutions that may improve smartphone security. It provides fundamental knowledge of the Android platform to help understand the attacks and security measures discussed later. Both system architecture and application structure is covered. The existing security solutions included utilize many of the aspects from the system architecture, but also consist of external mechanisms, like the application vetting.To determine what new security solutions to suggest, the most prominent and notorious attacks have been examined. Trojans, attacks through advertisement and attacks through WebView were identified as the greatest threats. The information acquired from assessing these was also used for evaluating the effectiveness of the proposed security measures. As a means of quantifying the evaluation of the new measures, a threat model has been used.The thesis concludes with determining the effect the new features will have for different types of smartphone users, and also ranks the suggested features according to which were deemed most influential.