SEMOVA: Secure and Efficient Mobile OS-level Virtualization Architecture

ABSTRACT:As increasing cyber threats are targeting mobile devices, the idea of applying virtualization to mobile devices has been prevalent recently. The Virtual Machine (VM), i.e., virtualization, technologies have shown great potential to significantly enhance the security level of mobile devices, and developers have begun porting existing VM technologies to mobile devices, such as Xen and KVM on ARM devices. However, these approaches are not widespread due to the performance penalty introduced by system-level virtualization. In this effort, IAI propose to develop SEMOVA, a secure and efficient OS-level virtualization architecture for mobile devices. SEMOVA allows multiple Android guests to run simultaneously on the same physical smartphone while providing native hardware device performance. Furthermore, SEMOVA utilizes a set of protection techniques to protect the data-in-use, data-at-rest, and data-in-transit. The SEMOVA will significantly reduce the overhead of running multiple Android instances, while improving secure access within untrusted environments.BENEFIT:The proposed solution is well-suited for securing resource-limited mobile devices within untrusted environments. The proposed solution has great potential in Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) programs. The emerging of BYOD concept requires a secure and easily configurable environment to different mobile systems and applications with different security levels. SEMOVA can provide a rigid isolation of applications for different scenarios and guarantee the corresponding security requirements. The addressable market size of the proposed SEMOVA technology is expected to be more than $200+ Billion in the civilian and commercial segments and $50+ Million for military applications.