| Abstract | Today, cross-device communication and intelligent resource sharing among smart devices is limited and inflexible: Typically devices cooperate using fixed interfaces provided by custom-built applications, which users need to install manually. This is tedious, time consuming, bears security and privacy risks, and contrasts the idea of Internet of Things (IoT) where intelligent devices operate in concert to enrich the overall user experience by sharing resources and capabilities.
We present Xapp, a context-aware service mobility framework for Android. Our goal is to enable users to securely distribute the functionality of applications to mutually untrusted smart devices, e.g., to enable a smartphone to use a nearby Android TV screen as a display for a video call, let a smartphone navigation app direct an autonomous vehicle, or let it use the vehicle for an object-recognition task rather than using a cloud service with the attendant privacy risks. We built a prototype for Android as the first step towards this goal. Our system is a set of extensions to the existing Remote-OSGi service platform, an emerging industry standard which unfortunately does not secure the communications between devices. This paper describes our proposal for the required security architecture. We designed and implemented an authentication protocol suite, where trust is bootstrapped using NFC for the sake of usability. On top of this we built a fine-grained access control system so that mutually mistrustful Xapp apps can be used simultaneously in the same neighborhood and even on the same devices. Hence, with Xapp users can run an Android app across multiple devices without having to install it on each of them individually. As proof of concept we present the implementation and evaluation of a video call app. |
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