Access Control Policy on Mobile Operating System Frameworks –A survey

Background: Access control is the method of granting permissions according to policies. Mobile devices, such as Smartphone, are acting as multi-purpose devices for private as well as the corporate environment. Since the applications in the Smartphone are accessing in various contexts, there would be a leakage of data and applications. Furthermore, when third party apps are downloading on Android-based platforms, it causes threats to the existing system applications. So, different access control policies have been implemented in the Android-based Smartphone to separate the own application and corporate application for providing security. Methods: This paper presents a survey of access control models in various frameworks and compares them by their performance evaluations. The performance of each framework is corresponding to the characteristics of access control policies. These access controls are categorizing according to role, discretionary, mandatory, context, and attributes. Finding: We have found that, Context-Based Access Control (CBAC) and Dynamic Role Based Access Control (DRBAC) are providing better performance. Hence, to give robust security for mobile operating systems the hybrid access policies can be considered. Applications: This hybrid approach might provide a good Android security framework with acceptable performance.