Enhancing Java ME Security Support with Resource Usage Monitoring

Both the spreading and the capabilities of mobile devices have dramatically increased over the last years. Nowadays, many mobile devices are able to run Java applications, that can create Internet connections, send SMS messages, and perform other expensive or dangerous operations on the mobile device. Hence, an adequate security support is required to meet the needs of this new and evolving scenario. This paper proposes an approach to enhance the security support of Java Micro Edition, based on the monitoring of the usage of mobile device resources performed by MIDlets. A process algebra based language is used to define the security policy and a reference monitor based architecture is exploited to monitor the resource usage. The paper also presents the implementation of a prototype running on a real mobile device, along with some preliminary performance evaluation.