Visualizations and Switching Mechanisms for Security Zones

Abstract

The ongoing evolution of mobile phones to "pocket computers" generated a demand for more and more applications to be ported to the mobile phone. Because a full security assessment for a whole mobile operating system would be prohibitively costly, currently security critical applications can not be implemented. We address this challenge by introducing security zones to enable applications with high security demands like driving licenses, health insurance cards, or passports on mobile phones. This zone concept creates the need for visualization of the current zone and a way to switch between zones. In this paper we discuss several possible ways of achieving this.