Condroid: A Container-Based Virtualization Solution Adapted for Android Devices

Abstract

Mobile virtualization, emerging fairly recently, is considered to be a valuable way to mitigate security risks on Android devices. In this paper, we propose a lightweight Android virtualization solution based on container technology, named Condroid. Condroid includes resource isolation based on namespace feature and resource control based on cgroups feature. By leveraging them, Condroid can host several independent Android virtual machines. Our approach requires only a single kernel to support several Android containers. Therefore, we can get a higher performance compared to other virtualization solutions. Furthermore, our implementation presents system service sharing mechanism to reduce memory utilization and file system sharing mechanism to reduce storage usage. The evaluation results on Google Nexus 5 demonstrate that Condroid is feasible in terms of runtime, hardware resource overhead, and compatibility.