A Case for Enforcing App-Specific Constraints to Mobile Devices by Using Trust Leases

In certain usage scenarios, mobile devices are required to operate in some constrained manner. For example, when movies are being screened in movie theaters, all devices in the room must be muted. However, typical mobile devices operate in unrestricted mode, allowing users to control their configurations. As a result, it is hard to guarantee that mobile devices operate under certain restrictions. In this paper, we present a security architecture that enables mobile applications to temporarily restrict the functionality of devices. To this end, we introduce a novel abstraction for mobile operating systems (MOS) called trust lease, which enables devices to safely switch between modes. We discuss the design implications that need to be addressed to implement this primitive on modern MOSes.