Security and Permissions 安全与权限 （一）

Android is a multi-process system, in which each application (and parts of the system) runs in its own process. Most security between applications and the system is enforced at the process level through standard Linux facilities, such as user and group IDs that are assigned to applications. Additional finer-grained security features are provided through a "permission" mechanism that enforces restrictions on the specific operations that a particular process can perform, and per-URI permissions for granting ad-hoc access to specific pieces of data.
Android是一个多进程系统，在这个系统中，应用程序（或者系统的部分）会在自己的进程中运行。系统和应用之间的安全性是通过Linux的facilities（工具，功能）在进程级别来强制实现的，比如会给应用程序分配user ID和Group ID。更细化的安全特性是通过"Permission"机制对特定的进程的特定的操作进行限制，而"per-URI permissions"可以对获取特定数据的access专门权限进行限制。

Security Architecture
A central design point of the Android security architecture is that no application, by default, has permission to perform any operations that would adversely impact other applications, the operating system, or the user. This includes reading or writing the user's private data (such as contacts or e-mails), reading or writing another application's files, performing network access, keeping the device awake, etc.
安全架构
Android安全架构中一个中心思想就是：应用程序在默认的情况下不可以执行任何对其他应用程序，系统或者用户带来负面影响的操作。这包括读或写用户的私有数据（如联系人数据或email数据），读或写另一个应用程序的文件，网络连接，保持设备处于非睡眠状态。

An application's process is a secure sandbox. It can't disrupt other applications, except by explicitly declaring the permissions it needs for additional capabilities not provided by the basic sandbox. These permissions it requests can be handled by the operating in various ways, typically by automatically allowing or disallowing based on certificates or by prompting the user. The permissions required by an application are declared statically in that application, so they can be known up-front at install time and will not change after that.
一个应用程序的进程就是一个安全的沙盒。它不能干扰其它应用程序，除非显式地声明了"permissions"，以便它能够获取基本沙盒所不具备的额外的能力。它请求的这些权限"permissions"可以被各种各样的操作处理，如自动允许该权限或者通过用户提示或者证书来禁止该权限。应用程序需要的那些"permissions"是静态的在程序中声明，所以他们会在程序安装时就被知晓，并不会再改变。

Application Signing
All Android applications (.apk files) must be signed with a certificate whose private key is held by their developer. This certificate identifies the author of the application. The certificate does not need to be signed by a certificate authority: it is perfectly allowable, and typical, for Android applications to use self-signed certificates. The certificate is used only to establish trust relationships between applications, not for wholesale control over whether an application can be installed. The most significant ways that signatures impact security is by determining who can access signature-based permissions and who can share user IDs.
所有的Android应用程序（.apk文件）必须用证书进行签名认证，而这个证书的私钥是由开发者保有的。该证书可以用以识别应用程序的作者。该证书也不需要CA签名认证（注：CA就是一个第三方的证书认证机构，如verisign等）。Android应用程序允许而且一般也都是使用self-signed证书（即自签名证书）。证书是用于在应用程序之间建立信任关系，而不是用于控制程序是否可以安装。签名影响安全性的最重要的方式是通过决定谁可以进入基于签名的permisssions，以及谁可以share 用户IDs。