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Secure Containers in Android: The Samsung KNOX Case Study

Published:24 October 2016Publication History

ABSTRACT

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is a growing trend among enterprises, aiming to improve workers' mobility and productivity via their smartphones. The threats and dangers posed by the smartphones to the enterprise are also ever-growing. Such dangers can be mitigated by running the enterprise software inside a "secure container" on the smartphone. In our work we present a systematic assessment of security critical areas in design and implementation of a secure container for Android using reverse engineering and attacker-inspired methods. We do this through a case-study of Samsung KNOX, a real-world product deployed on millions of devices. Our research shows how KNOX security features work behind the scenes and lets us compare the vendor's public security claims against reality. Along the way we identified several design weaknesses and a few vulnerabilities that were disclosed to Samsung.

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    • Published in

      cover image ACM Conferences
      SPSM '16: Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Security and Privacy in Smartphones and Mobile Devices
      October 2016
      130 pages
      ISBN:9781450345644
      DOI:10.1145/2994459

      Copyright © 2016 ACM

      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Publication History

      • Published: 24 October 2016

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      SPSM '16 Paper Acceptance Rate13of31submissions,42%Overall Acceptance Rate46of139submissions,33%

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