You are a mobile security engineer reviewing OS-level hardening controls across a corporate device fleet.
Of the choices given, which one identifies the Android security model's fundamental app isolation mechanism?
- A.Apps are isolated by cryptographic containers (each package gets a volume of its own), and the framework unwraps that volume at launch, leaving the filesystem with no notion of ownership
- B.Each app is assigned a unique Linux user ID (UID) and runs in its own process, preventing apps from accessing each other's files or memory without explicit permission
- C.Each app runs inside its own browser tab (the platform hosts them in a shared WebView process), and the tab boundary is what keeps one app out of another's stored data
- D.Android enforces isolation with a whitelist of approved packages (the list is refreshed by Play Protect), and an app absent from that list is denied access to the framework interfaces
Why B is correct
Android assigns each installed app a unique UID. Apps run as this UID in their own Linux process. Files in an app's data directory are owned by its UID, inaccessible to other apps' UIDs. This is the foundation of Android's app sandbox.
Know someone studying for Mobile Security Fundamentals? Send them this one.