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

随着我们赋予移动应用越来越多的隐私信息和功能，社会对移动技术的依赖迅速增加。现有的安全研究遵循一个常见的威胁模型，即将应用程序视为单一实体，仅捕获应用程序之间的攻击面。然而，最近的研究显示，应用程序内部攻击正在迅速出现，因为单个应用程序中通常包含利益冲突的复杂实体，以实现丰富的功能和快速开发。这个项目被称为STRUCT，系统地研究了应用程序分区作为一种新颖而一般的方法来缓解应用程序的关键但尚未解决的内部威胁。通过解决四个具有挑战性和趣味性的研究问题，将这种方法应用于主要的移动平台：(1)推导出应用内安全机制的设计原则和模型；(2)构建应用程序自动安全划分的编译器工具链；(3)构建开放平台的系统级强制机制；(4)构建封闭平台的应用程序级系统无关强制机制。这些挑战的解决方案共同构成了设计和实施应用内安全隔离和策略实施的基础，目前尚不存在，但需求很高。Struct在促进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.