Jefferson's Wheel

Fraudulent mobile applications could trick users into entering sensitive passwords, and then send those passwords to rogue site operators. With current technologies, users have no way of knowing that when they enter a password it is going to the intended application. What is needed is a trusted path for password entry, so when users enter a password they can trust that it will only be visible to the trusted provider.

This paper presents a solution that does not require any modifications to existing apps or application servers, but modifies the Android kernel to establish a shared secret between the user and kernel as part of the boot process, and then uses that shared secret to provide a trusted path for password entry.

Tianhao Tong will present the paper at Moble Security Technologies (MoST) in San Francisco, CA, 23 May 2013.

Paper: Tianhao Tong and David Evans. GuarDroid: A Trusted Path for Password Entry. In Moble Security Technologies (MoST), San Francisco, CA, 23 May 2013. [PDF, 10 pages]

Code: GuarDroid.net