DiffUser: Differentiated user access control on smartphones

Abstract

Smartphones have been widely used in recent years due to their capabilities of supporting many applications from simple Short Message Service messages to complicated Location-based services. It is challenging for smartphones to enable their end users to manage all applications in all possible use cases to protect privacy or sensitive data. However, the security model for smartphone users is still a two-state model in which they can do anything or absolutely nothing, and it is no longer suitable. In this paper, we propose DiffUser, a differentiated user access control model to enhance smartphone security and user privacy. DiffUser classifies smartphone users based on certain sets of user access privileges. We implement a prototype of DiffUser on real-world T-Mobile G1 smartphones. The evaluation results show that our system is lightweight and flexible.