Hackers in Your Pocket: A Survey of Smartphone Security Across Platforms

In the past research on smart phone operating system security has been scattered over blog posts and other non-archival publications. Over the last 5 years with advent of Android, iOS and Windows Phone 7, an increasing amount of research has also been published in the academic sphere on individual security mechanisms of the three platfroms. However, for a non-expert it is hard to get an overview over this research area. In this paper, we close this gap and provide a structured easy to access overview on the security features and prior research of the three most popular smartphone platforms: Android, iOS, and Windows Phone 7. In particular, we discuss and compare how each of these platforms uses sandboxing and memory protection, provides code signing, protects service connections, provides application shop security, and handles permissions.