Toward Practical Use of Virtual Smartphone

Recently, remote access via smartphones to enterprise data has been rapidly increasing. Virtual Smartphone was prototyped as a data leakage prevention solution tailored for smartphones. Toward practical use of Virtual Smartphone, we enhance overall system architecture. To study the issues, we conduct an internal trial in NTT laboratories. And then, we find some important specific issues in addition to usability, reliability, and economic efficiency. These specific issues include i) multi-instance associations with an end-user, ii) isolation among virtual instances and iii) changing the screen resolution dynamically. Issues i), ii) and iii) derive from virtual Android-x86 instances at the server side. We solve the above issues by overall enhancement of system architecture. Specifically, we add several functions to system architecture: 1) access controls between an end-user and plural virtual instances, 2) leveraging cloud computing platform, 3) on-demand grub menu edit, 4) monitoring traffics for each instances and 5) aggregation among application information for each end-user´s instance. Function 1) solves the issue i). For the economic efficiency, we need to reduce the operational cost. Then, we leverages cloud computing platform such as OpenStack (function 2)) since it automates network configuration, etc. This also solves the issue ii). Function 3) helps to change the screen resolution dynamically. Preventing attack from virtual instances to outside, we construct the monitoring function such as IDS/IPS (function 4)). When an end-user taps an application icon on the application list generated by function 5), a remote session of corresponding virtual instance is established. This improves the usability.