Current Research Projects

Multilevel Android Protection Exploit

Students: Felix Rohrer, Kenneth Nimley and Nebiyu Feleke
(Student Poster on BU Science and Engineering Symposium)

Smartphones have become an emerging platform for both personal and business applications. With almost half of smartphone market share, android operating system (OS) is an open-source platform based on Linux available on a variety of mobile devices. While the open nature of Android offers great flexibility and popularity, it also makes the android more vulnerable to many security threats. After analyzing more than dozen of solutions proposed by different research groups, our research proposes a multilevel protection framework on android to prevent, avoid and detect attacks. The proposed research involves three research projects to address android security at three different levels: user, developer, and system level, with each student leading one research project.

  • At the application user level, we propose to develop a tool that leverages data mining techniques to automatically extract and analyze the security information of the applications, in order to detect and report the potential security threats.
  • At the application developer level, we propose to develop an Eclipse plug-in to prevent attacks by educating developers to write more secure android applications.
  • At the operating system level, we propose to enhance the current protection mechanism through role-based model and implement a probabilistic protection mechanism as part of the android framework that leverages the historical data to make better security decisions while reducing the energy overhead.

Interactive OS Simulator

Students: Jan Horus, Matthew Power-feeling, Felix Rohrer.