How secure is your smartphone: An analysis of smartphone security mechanisms

Smartphones are becoming more and more popular due to the increase in their processing power, mobility aspect and personal nature. Android is one of the most popular and fully customizable open source mobile platforms that come with a complete software stack. One of the main reasons behind the rapid growth in adoption of smartphones is their capability to facilitate users with third-party applications. Android offers hundreds of thousands of applications via application markets and users can readily install these applications. However, this rapid growth in smartphone usage and the ability to install third-party applications has given rise to several security concerns. In this paper, we present the current state of smartphone security mechanisms and their limitations in order to identify certain security requirements for proposing enhancements for the smartphone security model. We analyze the improvements proposed for the basic Android security model and discuss their advantages and limitations in detail. We also present certain security requirements that need to be fulfilled in order to design and implement security enhancements for Android that can be widely adopted by the broader community.