A Study for Protecting the Virtual Memory of Applications

Abstract

: As information technology advances rapidly, various smart devices are becoming an essential element in our lives. Smart devices are providing services to users through applications up on the operating system. Operating systems have a variety of rules, such as scheduling applications and controlling hardwares. Among those rules, it is significant to protect private information in the information-oriented society. Therefore, isolation task, that makes certain memory space separated for each application, should highly be guaranteed. However, modern operating system offers the function to access the memory space from other applications for the sake of debugging. If this ability is misused, private information can be leaked or modified. Even though the access authority to memory is strictly managed, there exist cases found exploited. In this paper, we analyze the problems of the function provided in the Android environment that is the most popular and opened operating system. Also, we discuss how to avoid such kind of problems and verify with experiments.