Android Mobile Virtualization Running Multiple Isolated Personas

Cellrox is a mobile virtualization company founded in 2011. Its technology addresses bring-your-own-device programs, where an employer needs corporate applications and data on a phone that the employee owns and also uses personally. Rather than wrapping individual applications or issuing a second handset, Cellrox splits the device itself into separate environments. The core technology was licensed from research conducted at Columbia University on lightweight virtualization for mobile operating systems, and the company has run enterprise pilots of the approach.

The product is called ThinVisor. It does not run multiple full operating system instances; instead it extends Linux kernel namespaces with device namespaces, allowing several virtual runtime environments, called personas, to share one kernel and one set of hardware. Each persona has its own applications, data, and settings, and appears to the user as a separate phone. Because the approach is namespace-based rather than hypervisor-based, unmodified native applications run at close to normal speed and battery cost.

Multiple personas can be active at once, and the design allows more than two on a single handset. The separation means corporate policy, encryption, and remote wipe can apply to the work persona alone, leaving the employee's personal data untouched, which is the usual sticking point in bring-your-own-device deployments. Cellrox has offered the technology to enterprises directly and also as a component that device makers and mobile management vendors can embed in their own products.