MyAV: An all-round virtual machine monitor for mobile environments

Recently, various security issues in mobile devices have appeared due to improvement of the performance of mobile devices and the emergence of open mobile platforms. In this paper, we present MyAV, which is an all-round virtual machine monitor, to support various platforms from x86 desktops to ARM embedded platforms by minimizing the processor dependencies. It provides a secure execution environment using newly proposed technique of kernel-user address space separation. Many security vendors offer many different solutions including vaccine development for mobile devices, but it is still difficult to respond quickly to new malware. Another solution is resource isolation using virtual machine to share conventional hardware in a safe environment. However, existing virtual machines are unsuitable to be applied to mobile devices, because the original purpose of those virtual machines is based on server virtualization technology for operating a large number of guests. We present our design considerations using the resource isolation technique and report various experimental results based on the x86 desktop and an ARM embedded environment.