Abstract
Information and communication technologies, such as remote health monitoring and mobile Internet, have played a key role on a major improvement on patients’ lives. The problem is that patient monitoring requires higher degree of security and robustness than those provided by the typical Internet technologies. One viable solution to address these issues is DevCom (Device Communities), a network system that supports persistent, secure and user-friendly communications between doctor’s and patient’s devices. This thesis investigates the use of DevCom to secure device communications in the domain of remote health monitoring systems. To address limitations of DevCom on modern mobile devices, we design the system called DevComApp. DevComApp aims to bring DevCom to mobile devices and to provide a user-friendly way to pair them. An attempt to port DevCom inside an Android application in native C language reveals a major issue of failing ioctl() function call that is critical for tunneling functionality in DevCom. Conducted systematic analysis of the ioctl() issue shows the inability of processes started by the native C part of the Android application to obtain certain permissions. In order to address this issue, other developers should consider six possible solutions that we present in the thesis. Five of the solutions require root access to the device, while the sixth one allows to avoid rooting by reimplementing certain functionality in Java/Kotlin instead of C.