Solutions for Adjusting SELinux To Android-Powered Devices

안드로이드 응용 단말기를 위한 SELinux 환경설정 방법

Google Android framework consists of an operating system and software platform for mobile devices. Using a general-purpose Linux operating system in mobile device has some advantages but also security risks. Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) is a kernel-based protection approach which can help to reduce potential damage from successful attacks. However, there are some challenges to integrate SELinux in Android. In this research, we do a study on how to do the integration and find out four challenges. The first one is that the Android file system (yaff2) does not support security namespace for extended attribute (xattr) which is required by SELinux. The second one is that it's difficult to apply SELinux policy to Dalvik process on which an Android application runs on. The third one is that Android lacks methods, tools and libraries to interact with SELinux. The last one is how to update the SELinux policy automatically when installing or removing an application. In this paper, we propose solutions for the above limitations that make the SELinux more adaptive and suitable for Android framework.