WallDroid: Cloud Assisted Virtualized Application Specific Firewalls for the Android OS

Abstract

Security is becoming an increasingly important feature of today's mobile environment where users download unknown apps and connect their smartphones to unknown networks while roaming. This paper proposes and evaluates an enhanced security model and architecture, WallDroid, enabling virtualized application specific firewalls managed by the cloud. The WallDroid solution can be considered as an Android Firewall Application but with some extra functionality. Key components used by the solution include VPN technologies like the Point to Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP) and the Android Cloud to Device Messaging Framework (C2DM). Our solution is based on the cloud keeping track of millions of applications and their reputation (good, bad, or unknown) and comparing traffic flows of applications with a list of known malicious IP servers. We describe a prototype implementation and evaluate our solution.