TWC: Small: STRUCT: Enabling Secure and Trustworthy Compartments in Mobile Applications

随着我们赋予移动应用程序越来越多的私人信息和功能，社会对移动技术的依赖迅速增加。现有的安全研究遵循一种常见的威胁模型，将应用视为整体实体，只捕获应用之间的攻击面。然而，最近的研究表明，应用内部攻击正在迅速出现，因为为了实现丰富的功能和快速开发，通常会在单个应用中包含具有冲突利益的复杂实体。这个名为STRUCT的项目系统地研究了应用程序划分，将其作为一种新颖而通用的方法来减轻应用程序的关键但尚未解决的内部威胁。它通过解决四个具有挑战性和有趣的研究问题，将这种方法应用于主要的移动平台：(1)推导设计应用程序内部安全机制的原则和模型；(2)构建编译器工具链，用于自动安全地划分应用程序；(3)构建开放平台的系统级执行机制；(4)为封闭平台构建应用级与系统无关的执行机制。这些挑战的解决方案共同构成了应用程序内部安全隔离和策略执行的设计和实现的基础，这些目前还不存在，但需求量很大。STRUCT在培养移动安全研究和教育的新方向以及在安全敏感场景中增加社会对移动技术的采用方面具有更广泛的影响。

Society's dependence on mobile technologies rapidly increases as we entrust mobile applications with more and more private information and capabilities. Existing security research follows a common threat model that treats apps as monolithic entities and only captures attack surface between apps. However, recent research reveals that app internal attacks are emerging quickly as complex entities with conflicting interests are commonly included inside a single app to allow for rich features and fast development. This project, known as STRUCT, systematically investigates app compartmentalization as a novel and general approach to mitigating the critical yet unaddressed internal threats of apps. It applies this approach to major mobile platforms via solving four challenging and interesting research problems: (1) Deriving principles and models for designing intra-app security mechanisms; (2) Building compiler toolchains for automatically and securely compartmentalizing apps; (3) Building system-level enforcement mechanisms for open platforms; (4) Building app-level system-agnostic enforcement mechanisms for closed platforms. Solutions to these challenges together form a foundation to the design and implementation of intra-app security isolation and policy enforcement, which is currently nonexistent but in high demand. STRUCT has its broader impact in fostering a new direction in mobile security research and education as well as increasing society's adoption of mobile technology in security-sensitive scenarios.