Can an android app dominate on hardware resources?

Question

I am actually studying mobile security and I am focusing on hardware protection, so, I wonder, if is it possible an app can access to mobile hardware resources, and dominate on them, so, no access to any hardware resource by other apps only if permission was given by the dominating app? (as a second level of hardware security).

Answer 1

At least for camera, I'm aware of using Android Device Administration with a policy to Disable camera: https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/admin/device-admin.html Typically using a Mobile Device Manager would be used on authorized devices by corporations/governments in sensitive locations. Other restrictions are probably available as the Device Manager software would be accessing Device Manufacturer APIs.

Another method to achieve your goal of 'wrapping' the hardware is to not let the Android app actually talk to Android framework methods. Basically the client app would be running a virtual container with the container mocking Android framework APIs.

See: How to execute APKs on a customized data directory?

And Commonsware's blog post for additional details: https://commonsware.com/blog/2017/01/17/droidception.html

This would allow you to add additional restrictions at the cost of having all of the apps go through the virtual container. Enforcing the user to always use the container isn't really possible unless you are building a custom ROM or perhaps rooted.

And if you are doing a custom ROM or rooted you might as well add any additional hardware restrictions through those methods.