Powering approximately 600 million devices worldwide, the Android operating system has become a leader in the smartphone world. One of the main cited reasons for its success is its open source nature, which has enabled device manufacturers, mobile carriers, and end users to customize their products according to their business and personal needs. At the same time however, this freedom has introduced a large fragmentation in the landscape of Android smartphones making updates and security improvements harder to get to end users and often breaking existing security features.

Android's security features build upon a consolidated Linux kernel and a fine grained and extensible application permission model. This talk provides an overview of these features and of recent research on security and privacy in Android. In particular, the talk covers research on the permission model of Android, existing malware, and privacy in Android applications.