Secure Mobile Application Management Framework

Date
2018-04
Authors
Keshta, Nesma Mohamed Nasser Abdelhamid
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Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research, University of Regina
Abstract

The growing reliance on mobile devices as a productive digital platform has led to increasing enterprise demand for safer mobile application framework. Government organizations including public safety are starting to deploy mobile devices into their organizations to assist public safety personnel in their response to emergency situations effectively and to assist them in performing their day to day operations by bringing information at their fingertips at the right time. The need and reliance on mobility platforms come associated with increased vulnerabilities due to the nature of mobility and the sophistication of modern security attacks. In this thesis, we investigate existing security technologies, and standards collected from different government organizations, non-government organizations, private industry, vendors, and study groups including the Department of National Defense (Defense Research and Development Canada – DRDC), the Centre for Security and Safety Program (CSSP), The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), Chief Information Officers Council (CIO Council)/Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO), National Institute for Standards Technologies (NIST), FirstNet, National Public Safety Technology Interoperability Consortium (NPSTIC), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Department of Defense (DoD), Cloud Security Alliance, Chief, Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP), GlobalPlatform, Trusted Computing Group, National Information Assurance Partnership (NIAP), Silent Circle, Wide Point, and other organizations involved in mobility and security. In addition, the study identifies approaches to monitor, detect, and sense potential attacks taking place from within or outside mobile devices and applications. As a result, while there are enormous recommendations and relevant studies that address different mobility ecosystem components and technologies, we observed the lack of integration between different technologies and solutions. This raises the need for a single comprehensive framework based on existing standards and available technologies that can provide essential integration in order to ensure a baseline security level for mobility management within government organizations and public safety community. We propose a framework, namely, Public Safety Grade-Mobile Application Management Framework (PSG-MAMF), which is a system that includes a group of system components with integral security functions into a single framework, as well as extra security considerations, technologies, standards, and policies. PSG-MAMF is intended to provide semi-closed ecosystem components that can integrate effectively to provide the security functionalities required to address the threats and vulnerabilities of mobile devices, applications, and information in public safety environments. PSG-MAMF intended to address the unique challenges with mobility management and security gaps in existing ecosystems as identified by the PSG-MAMF security evaluation. PSG-MAMF improves the security of mobile devices and applications use by the government and public safety, while providing safer ways to access information infrastructure and by adhering to organizational policies. Compared to other efforts and advanced security solutions available for mobility management, PSG-MAMF provides a level of integration that is not available in other ecosystems provided by other research studies (e.g. NIST ecosystem) and other existing products supported by different vendors (e.g. Blackberry, AirWatch, etc.).

Description
A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Applied Science in Software Systems Engineering, University of Regina. xi, 300 p.
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