Bring your own device, securely

Modern mobile devices offer users powerful computational capabilities and complete customization. As a matter of fact, today smartphones and tablets have remarkable hardware profiles and a cornucopia of applications. Yet, the security mechanisms offered by most popular mobile operating systems offer only limited protection to the threats posed by malicious applications that may be inadvertently installed by the users and therefore they do not meet the security standards required in corporate environments. In this paper we propose a security framework for mobile devices that ensures that only applications complying with the organization security policy can be installed. This is done by inferring behavioral models from applications and by validating them against the security policy. We also present BYODroid, a prototype implementation of our proposed security framework for the Android OS.