Methodology and criteria for a comparative analysis of network firewalls in Android and iOS operating systems

Abstract

Relevance. Network firewalls in Android and iOS rely on architecturally heterogeneous solutions, and existing comparative studies treat the firewall only as one element of the overall security architecture, with no reproducible comparison procedure. The aim is to develop a reproducible methodology and a system of criteria for comparing network firewalls in Android (ninth to seventeenth versions) and iOS (fifteenth to twenty-seventh versions). Tasks: to analyze prior studies; to build the methodology as a sequence of methods; to formalize the system of criteria; to apply it to three approaches and derive recommendations. Methods: systems analysis of architectures (decomposition into kernel, system services/extensions, and user application levels), comparative analysis of primary technical documentation, criteria-based comparison, and synthesis. Scientific novelty lies in the ordered combination of standard methods with explicit rules for reducing heterogeneous architectures to a comparable form, selecting criteria with defined data sources and admissible values, and aggregating results. Practical significance: a “usage scenario – recommended approach” matrix for corporate security, personal privacy control, antivirus solutions, and parental control. Results. Four groups of criteria (architectural, functional, operational, security and trust) were developed and applied qualitatively to the kernel-oriented and VpnService-oriented approaches in Android and to NetworkExtension in iOS; the platform differences are systemic for criteria assessable without measurements and appear at the kernel, programming interface, and execution isolation levels. Conclusions. The study is qualitative, without measurements of latency, throughput, or power consumption; open-source implementations only verify criterion values; further research covers experimental evaluation, external expert assessment, and a cross-platform prototype.