Device-Centric Monitoring for Mobile Device Management

TL;DR

This paper introduces a device-centric runtime verification approach for mobile devices, enabling the monitoring of overall device behavior against policies, with an implementation for Android and empirical evaluation.

Contribution

It proposes a novel device-centric runtime verification method that considers the entire device behavior rather than individual applications, and provides an Android implementation.

Findings

Effective verification of device-wide policies achieved

Implementation successfully monitors device behavior in real-world scenarios

Empirical results demonstrate the approach's practicality and accuracy

Abstract

The ubiquity of computing devices has led to an increased need to ensure not only that the applications deployed on them are correct with respect to their specifications, but also that the devices are used in an appropriate manner, especially in situations where the device is provided by a party other than the actual user. Much work which has been done on runtime verification for mobile devices and operating systems is mostly application-centric, resulting in global, device-centric properties (e.g. the user may not send more than 100 messages per day across all applications) being difficult or impossible to verify. In this paper we present a device-centric approach to runtime verify the device behaviour against a device policy with the different applications acting as independent components contributing to the overall behaviour of the device. We also present an implementation for Android devices, and evaluate it on a number of device-centric policies, reporting the empirical results obtained.