AppBox: A Black-Box Application Sandboxing Technique for Mobile App Management Solutions

Maqsood Ahmad, Francesco Bergadano, Valerio Costamagna, Bruno Crispo, Giovanni Russello

Abstract: Several Mobile Device Management (MDM) and Mobile Application Management (MAM) services have been launched on the market. However, these services suffer from two important limitations: reduced granularity and need for app developers to include third party SDKs. We present AppBox, a novel black-box app-sandboxing solution for app customisation for stock Android devices. AppBox enables enterprises to select any app, even highly-obfuscated, from any market and perform a set of target customisations by means of fine-grained security policies. We have implemented and tested AppBox on various smartphones and Android versions. The evaluation shows that AppBox can effectively enforce fine-grained policies on a wide set of existing apps, with an acceptable overhead.