Anception: Application Virtualization For Android

TL;DR

Anception is a novel application virtualization framework for Android that enhances security against malware while maintaining acceptable performance overheads, by modifying the Android kernel to support flexible virtualization.

Contribution

It introduces the first flexible Android application virtualization system, addressing graphics performance and shared UID challenges, and demonstrating effective malware confinement with minimal overhead.

Findings

Confines many types of malware effectively

Achieves up to 3.9% overhead on graphics benchmarks

Supports unmodified Android applications

Abstract

The problem of malware has become significant on Android devices. Library operating systems and application virtualization are both possible solutions for confining malware. Unfortunately, such solutions do not exist for Android. Designing mechanisms for application virtualization is a significant chal- lenge for several reasons: (1) graphics performance is important due to popularity of games and (2) applications with the same UID can share state. This paper presents Anception, the first flexible application virtualization framework for Android. It is imple- mented as a modification to the Android kernel and supports application virtualization that addresses the above requirements. Anception is able to confine many types of malware while supporting unmodified Android applications. Our Anception- based system exhibits up to 3.9% overhead on various 2D/3D benchmarks, and 1.8% overhead on the SunSpider benchmark.