Improving Android security through real-time policy enforcement

Abstract

The use of the Android operating system has become a very popular option with a vast variety of mobile devices. This popularity means that companies and other users are more likely to consider using android devices. Naturally there will be users and companies concerned with how their Android devices are used. Therefore, some sort of device management is required. Let us consider a coffee distribution company that has employees visiting its customers to showcase new products and take orders. Such a company would need to provide its employees with portable devices containing sensitive data about their products and customers. Therefore, the company would want to limit access to such data to only authorized applications or users. It could also want to disable the android market or not allow untrusted applications from running on the mobile device. Another possible scenario could be that of having parents concerned with how their children use their mobile devices. It is well known that children love to play games, therefore a parent might want to control the amount of hours per day that they could spend playing on their mobile device. They could also want to make sure that the browsers that their children use, filter out bad websites. Parents could also want to control how many messages and phone calls their children make.