Privaros: A Framework for Privacy-Compliant Delivery Drones

We present Privaros, a framework to enforce privacy policies on drones. Privaros is designed for commercial delivery drones, such as the ones that will likely be used by Amazon Prime Air. Such drones visit a number of host airspaces, each of which may have different privacy requirements. Privaros provides an information flow control framework to enforce the policies of these hosts on the guest delivery drones. The mechanisms in Privaros are built on top of ROS, a middleware popular in many drone platforms. This paper presents the design and implementation of these mechanisms, describes how policies are specified, and shows that Privaros's policy specification can be integrated with India's Digital Sky portal. Our evaluation shows that a drone running Privaros can robustly enforce various privacy policies specified by hosts, and that its core mechanisms only marginally increase communication latency and power consumption

Improving Mobile Device Security with Operating System-Level Virtualization

In this paper, we propose a lightweight mechanism to isolate one or more Android userland instances from a trustworthy and secure entity. This entity controls and manages the Android instances and provides an interface for remote administration and management of the device and its software. Our approach includes several security extensions for secure network access, integrity protection of data on storage devices, and secure access to the touchscreen. Our implementation requires only minimal modification to the software stack of a typical Android-based smartphone, which allows easy porting to other devices when compared to other virtualization techniques. Practical tests show the feasibility of our approach regarding runtime overhead and battery lifetime impact