POSTER: DroidShield: Protecting user applications from normal world access

Smartphones are becoming the main data sharing and storage devices in both our personal and professional lives, as companies now allow employees to share the same device for both purposes, provided the company's confidential information can be protected. However, as history has shown, systems relying on security policies or rules to protect user data are not airtight. Any flaw in the constructed rules or in the code of privileged applications can lead to complete compromise. In addition, we can not rely only on Trust-Zone[1] world separation to isolate confidential data from unauthorized access, because in addition to severe limitations in terms of both communication and memory space, there is a very low limit on the number of applications that can be installed in the secure world before we can start questioning its security, especially when considering code originating from multiple sources. Thus, the solutions currently available for TrustZone devices are not perfect and the data confidentiality can not be guaranteed. We propose an alternative approach, which involves providing the majority of secure world application advantages to a set of normal world applications, with almost none of the drawbacks by relying only on the TrustZone world separation and the TZ-RKP[2] kernel protection scheme.