Device-Centric Monitoring for Mobile Device Management
This addresses the need for monitoring device behavior in scenarios like employer-provided devices, though it is incremental as it builds on existing runtime verification work.
The paper tackles the problem of verifying device-wide policies on mobile devices, which is difficult with application-centric approaches, by introducing a device-centric runtime verification method and implementing it on Android, reporting empirical results.
The ubiquity of computing devices has led to an increased need to ensure not only that the applications deployed on them are correct with respect to their specifications, but also that the devices are used in an appropriate manner, especially in situations where the device is provided by a party other than the actual user. Much work which has been done on runtime verification for mobile devices and operating systems is mostly application-centric, resulting in global, device-centric properties (e.g. the user may not send more than 100 messages per day across all applications) being difficult or impossible to verify. In this paper we present a device-centric approach to runtime verify the device behaviour against a device policy with the different applications acting as independent components contributing to the overall behaviour of the device. We also present an implementation for Android devices, and evaluate it on a number of device-centric policies, reporting the empirical results obtained.